| 1550h
Feeling... smart Happiness of the day: beautiful weather...sunny, clear sky...again Event of the week: 4 ushering assignments this week. [2 down!] The book I'm reading now is A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking. Am I a geek or what man.... But seriously, this book intrigues me..maybe it's the way he writes, I actually do understand most of what I've read so far. So I'm really proud of myself..though I've actually not gotten through half the book yet. Just this morning, I've just finished reading about the different models of our universe. Did you know that though Einstein's theory of relativity predicted that our universe is not static but forever expanding, he was so convinced that our universe has to be static that he chose to alter his theory to include a antigravity factor to counter the expansion forces. Or that the sun is 8 light-minutes away, which means that if it dies right now, we still can have 8 blissful minutes of existence before we know it. Or that the 1978 Nobel Prize winners Penzias and Wilson won the prize for detecting microwaves that demonstrate the expansion of the universe by accident. Or that though we are not the centre of the universe, it does appear that the the other galaxies are all moving away from us. Or that actually Newton didn't get hit on his head by an apple. Oh, and Stephen Hawking's 1st wife is called Jane Wilde......hehehe... I like this book...it describes what I want to know, in a qualitative way, instead of throwing up a whole bunch of equations. So far so good, I actually stay awake reading this, but not my semi-conductors textbook. Now all it needs are colourful pictures of stars, galaxies, planets..... Just last week, I finished reading a book about the discovery of the DNA double helix by Watson and Crick. It was more of a personal account, about the competing scientists, about Rosalind Franklin*, about the difficulties, challenges and frustrations of research work....I guess it helped that I know about the DNA molecule, and have that little bit of background knowledge about biochemistry to understand the complications. I still have another book sitting on my shelf now I want to finish reading before I go back to singapore, about superstrings, blackholes, worm holes and things like that. Funny I find these things so interesting...since I work at the Physics library, and must be the only employee there who actually borrows physics books. I think eventually I want to own a copy of A Brief History Of Time myself. This is already the 2nd time I'm reading this [the last time was winter break of 1999] and I'm still learning new things. Things I didn't understand last time, suddenly it seems easier now. I feel like I can read it 10 times and still learn more. Point of this all? Man, I'm a science geek..... Rosalind Franklin was a female scientist who was also working on the DNA structure, contemporary to Watson and Crick. She was deemed selfish and difficult, for being extremely possessive of her crystallography X-ray diagrams of DNA strands, which were also the best available then. Some believe that for that reason, she was not acknowledged for her work in the discovery of the DNA structure and did not get a share of the Nobel Prize awarded in 1962. But few understood the social pressure she faced for being a female in a male-dominated scientific world. She eventually proved to be a skilled professional scientist who did excellent work. Unfortunately, she passed away at an early age of 37. | |