Science creates a framework for understanding the material world, and Engineering creates tools for facilitating our lives based on this understanding. Two industrial revolutions have freed people from laborious work and travel to the extent that was hard to imagine for people before these revolutions. Understanding and manipulating the material world are great advances for human beings. How about applying this idea to life itself?

Lack of a user manual of one’s body and life

Science and Engineering are based on the basic expectation that the understanding and the tools they create can make the world a better place. However, just in the same way that a knife can be used to cook delicious cuisine and can be also used to commit murder, there is no reason to prefer to believe the produce of Science and Engineering to have good impact. If we don’t think about this carefully, it is possible to hold a sharp knife but to cut oneself constantly, without even noticing. That’s like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings. Nevertheless, I feel people have spent way too much time learning the Science and Engineering about the material world, following the western way of education. People spend way less time learning how to shape oneself properly. A good knife should be held in a steady hand. Carl Jung was very clear on this in his 1959 interview.

Today I suddenly realized that Kepler problem is easier than I thought. I first met this problem in high school physics class around 2010 and 2011, where we were simply told that the orbit of a planet is an ellipse. The statement is clearly very important and it has a name, Kepler’s First Law. However, all later calculations in high school are circular motions. I never actually derived this fact myself from Newton’s law of motion. I believe the reason is that Calculus isn’t taught in high school.

After coming back from the APS March Meeting 2023 in Las Vegas, I went to The National Museum of Western Art at Ueno, Tokyo, with two friends, Li and Zhu on 19 March. It was a sunny Sunday, and our original plan was to enjoy the cherry blossom. But, it was too early and there was not much blossom so we decided to visit this Museum nearby. We have no expectation of what we would see.

From middle July 2022, I started studying general relativity (GR) again. I use three resource at the same time: 1) Prof. Scott Hughes’s MIT’s physics graduate course 8.962, 2) the textbook by Schutz and 3) Taylor, Wheeler and Bertschinger’s book: Exploring Black Holes. I’m happy that I finally finished all the video lectures of Prof. Hughes’s MIT course today. I talked about the first part of this course in my 2022 summary of physics post. After that, the second half of the course focuses on applications.

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I was trained to be a structural engineer but I want to be a theoretical physicist.

I was major in Japanese when I was a freshman in 2013. It was exciting and happy to study with so many young girls together: there are about 50 students who were major in Japanese but only five fellows! For a boy focusing on science side in high school in China, he had hardly seen over 10 girls during his whole high school life. Such a situation could not be better! Sadly, the boy read too many science popular books and was more curious about peculiar quantum mechanics, or even string theory at that time, so he decided to change his major. He first did some research on physics major in his university, but it turned out the people in the physics department look nothing like the characters in his book: Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, etc. As a result, he had to take the second best and went to civil engineering major, hoping he could meet more geek-like people there, since it was (and still is) the department with the most eminent professors and students in the country. He started his undergraduate training in structure engineering in 2014.

Here are a few things that I want to achieve in 2019.

Non-physics

I hope I can finish writing up my master thesis before September. The plan is to finish the first draft before mid July, and working on its revision starting from mid August.

About Physics

I’m so happy that The University of Tokyo (UTokyo) gives me one graduate school offer, so I can start my physics journey! Before attending UTokyo in September this year, I still need to learn more physics on my own. Here are my plans for first half year: