Rediscovering my greatest love, Physics!

When I was in high school, my favorite subject was always physics, due to my incredible teacher Michael Lampert (who was awarded by the president of the United States for being one of the greatest teachers in the Northwest).  Physics was introduced to me in a very fun and sensible way, involving many hands-on experiments such as building pulley systems, shining lasers through a small slit toward a system of mirrors, building little bridges, using the Van de Graaff generator, electrocuting things, freezing objects with liquid nitrogen, using a Tesla coil, using frequency generators and oscilloscopes, and cutting open cow eyeballs, among many other experiments!  I also took classes in microelectronics and robotics from the same teacher, it was such an amazing experience.  I also had one of the greatest calculus teachers in the country teaching me calculus!  I skipped pre-calculus because I wanted to take calculus, and I passed the AP exam with the highest possible score (along with everyone else in the class - our teacher Jon Kawamura was just that good).

As high school was ending, I had decided that I wanted to become a physicist, and the dream of going to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) made my mouth salivate.

The reason I became a music major is because I knew that the analytical and mathematical part of my mind was what I was especially good at, but I had developed a passion for music, and wanted to develop and build upon the artistic part of my mind.  There were also many musicians in my life who I wanted to be like, a few of which had previously gone to the UO.  Also, my sister's (ex-)boyfriend at the time was going to OSU to study mechanical engineering, and it didn't sound as fun as I had hoped - he later ended up with a job at Intel that he didn't enjoy.  I didn't want physics to become bothersome, so I focused on my creative enjoyment of music.

Well, after five years of studying music, I am starting to get involved with studying physics again!  Thanks to my friend Andrew's facebook posts about the physicist Richard Feynman, I have been watching video lectures of Feynman, and have even found a book full of 52 different chapters, each with a different lecture by Richard Feynman!  To make it more amazing, I found audio recordings of these same lectures online (the book was cleaned up with some editing), so I have been following along while listening to the lectures, and I am learning amazing things!

This is the first lecture in a series of four lectures that sparked my interest in looking deeper:

Nothing interests me more than discovering the realities behind our world and our existence!  The mysteries of what life really is, and the rules / laws that govern this reality are the most amazing thing to me!  As my past physics teacher Michael Lampert likes to describe physics, "Physics is the art of the Gods".  There is nothing more beautiful than this universe we live in - it's so surreal how incredible everything is, and even more surreal when you realize what is actually happening on the subatomic level and smaller!  The interactions between particles is something so unbelievably cool to me!

I am absolutely happy that I chose music composition as my major - I am not saying that I would give it up to study physics instead.  Though physics is what matters to me most, I think it's important to not major in what matters to you the most (at least not at a young age), because you don't want your greatest passion to become dull and boring through constant required study materials.  The freedom to study on your own is something that best serves learning!

My main focus is to become a film scoring composer, hopefully for Japanese anime, but that doesn't mean it is my greatest passion.  To me, composing music is incredibly fun and rewarding!  It is like a meditation, in that it is a healthy process of creativity (not bad for a life path!).

I am just so glad and thankful to be reminded of my deeper passion of physics.  :-)