Abstrosizics Ed. 1

One of my favorite stories to tell is why I chose astrophysics as my destination. Some of you may have heard this before - I love telling stories and I revel in nostalgia.

I might have been all of 3 (or maybe 5) when my older brother asked me what I wanted to become when I grew up. He always knew he wanted to be a doctor, and he is one now. I on the other hand never knew what would become of me.

So my first response was, "I don't want to become anything." I was fine with who I was. But after some cajoling I said, "Fine, I'll be the biggest word in the dictionary."

So I wooble-wobbled over to our book cabinet, pulled out a very large Merriam-Webster tome (3000+ pages), nearly tipped over from its weight, and wooble-wobbled back to my brother with the morbidly huge dictionary. I dropped it to the ground and opened it up, relishing the fresh smell of dust puffing out of it. Of course my heavily muscular 3-yr old arms (or was it 5?) were barely able to open the first few pages. I looked and the first word I saw was:

'astrophysics'

"That!," I said, "I'll be an abtrosizics!"

15 (or was it 13?) years later I wondered why I had chosen to be an abstrosizicist. I was searching through some sites trying to rekindle the romance for astronomy when I came to a short reading of Sean Caroll's "To Eternity and Back."

Slowly at first then with increasing passion I began to fall in love with the idea of a space-time duality, of the search for a unification theory, of the mathematical backbone of every observation, and at its simplest I fell in love with the idea of studying the beautiful sky to understand things we can't see.

And I came to the dumb question of the ages,

Why should the universe even bother to exist?