Physics and not-physics.
Jan. 23rd, 2006 07:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrissaSo I got asked the same question two different ways, or at least a similar question. One person said, "I'd be interested to hear why you switched from physics to writing full time, and what had drawn you to physics in the first place." Another said, "Why would you not go back to physics?"
Well. I was drawn to physics because the math is so pretty. In my experience, there are two kinds of physics geeks: the kind who like to tinker with stuff and later pick up the math background, and the kind who like math and later hone their tinkering skills. This does not map neatly to experimentalists and theorists, but it's all right to first-order approximations. I like the kind of math that goes with physics. I really, really like diff equs. They are good fun. More to the point, I think of most math in terms of the physics it can or can't do: linear algebra is for quantum mechanics. Etc.
My favorite classes were Modern, Modern lab, Math Methods, Quantum, Stat Mech, and Nuclear. (Four of those six were taught by the same person, and if I had chosen an advisor based on common interests, I would have picked Tom. And I really liked Tom. It's just that Dennis and I had already bonded.) I liked it when things worked out interestingly, and I also liked putting my hands on the weirdness and making it go. That's something physics has up on fiction: the weirdness stays in your head, with fiction. Even when it's down on the page, it's weird in the heads of people. But when you've got one of the labs going that demonstrates quantum nature of reality, you can slowly change a voltage and watch charge quantization under your very own hands. You can make light behave like a wave and like a particle in the same hour, on the same lab bench. It's a shivery feeling, making the weirdness go. I don't know of anything like it. Maybe pregnancy will be -- making the weird with your own body -- but maybe it'll be a different feeling of weird-making. Couldn't tell you yet.
I also really liked physics culture when I was in it -- at least at Gustavus. For the first time in my life, I couldn't coast through my classes. Doing well meant something. There was always a way to do better. The only place I'd had that before was with writing, and writing was lonely. There was nowhere to flop down and go, "Gahhhh, that story kicked my ass!" and have somebody commiserate. In the physics office you could always collapse at your desk or into the ugly green chair: "That test kicked my ass!" "You always say that, and you always do fine. Now, me, on the other hand...." "Oh, yeah, sure, you. Hey, what are you doing this summer?" "I thought I'd try to work for Paul. You gonna?" "Love Paul, hate optics. I'm going to try to get an REU somewhere else." "Cool. Hey, is that Rutherford scattering almost done?" "Aaaaah, I forgot to reset the run!" [exeunt, at a run] Being a physics major came with camaraderie. It meant something. About every second professor I had outside the department would inform me solemnly that they'd heard that the two toughest departments on campus were physics and their own department. Having a hyperverbal physics major in class made the weaker of the profs quake; several of them blanched and muttered "oh God" or something about my advisor when I'd been asking too many questions in class and they found out I was a physics major.
My intro creative writing course was filled with people who wanted an easy A and people who were convinced of their own creativity but had no idea where to direct it or no intention of working at it. There were a very few exceptions, but we didn't have much in common for type of work or anything like that. My upperclass fiction studio was, if anything, worse: my classmates kept bugging the professor to tell them what to write about. They wanted assignments. They wanted to be told to write a four to ten page story about Florida. I had taken the class to have an official schedule spot for my writing in a busy semester. I bitterly resented the few intrusions my professor made into my own project schedule; he was wise and did not make many. I have no idea what he told the other kids in conferences -- maybe he told them to write 500 words about crustaceans or 2000 words about death.
And here I wrench my brain away from attempts to formulate 2500-word story about crustacean death, and that, ultimately, is the point. Not killing as many shrimp as possible, but that there is always a story in here, and behind the story is another story, and one of the scariest things in the world is my "starters" file, because it's got a million and one titles and ideas, and many of them spark other titles and ideas as I read them, and I get dazzled, and I will never get to them all.
My brain never did that in physics.
I don't know if it ought to, or if nobody's does, but the point is, it didn't, and it does with fiction. And there is only so much Mris to be had, and human relationships are really important to me -- more important than pretty math, even -- so it wasn't a good idea to take time and energy from them. And in part I backed myself into this corner -- my brain is full of bits of fiction in part because I feed it full of other bits of fiction, and because I trained it to go on, to work them out and not just have little snippets that sound great in your head and don't go anywhere. I didn't understand the implications of that decision at first. I didn't know that it would make physics pale for me, that I would eventually have to leave. I thought I could do both, and maybe I could have if I wanted nothing else of life, no friends beyond lab buddies, no family, nothing else. But there just wasn't enough of me to do both, and when that much was true --
Well. I wanted to say there was nothing I could have done. But there was. It's one angle on the heart of flesh/heart of stone story: it wouldn't have been like a faucet, but I think I could have turned the fiction off. I don't think it would have turned the physics on, though. I think I would have been giving up the ideas and the excitement and the frustration and the feelings of good work and all of that for a steady, middle-of-the-road job as a professor at a small college. There's nothing wrong with that work. It can be inspired work, as several of my profs demonstrated. It can be a real life's work, a calling, and not just a job. But I don't think it would have been that for me. I think something in me would have gone quiet that shouldn't go quiet. I don't regret keeping that something alive.
Well. I was drawn to physics because the math is so pretty. In my experience, there are two kinds of physics geeks: the kind who like to tinker with stuff and later pick up the math background, and the kind who like math and later hone their tinkering skills. This does not map neatly to experimentalists and theorists, but it's all right to first-order approximations. I like the kind of math that goes with physics. I really, really like diff equs. They are good fun. More to the point, I think of most math in terms of the physics it can or can't do: linear algebra is for quantum mechanics. Etc.
My favorite classes were Modern, Modern lab, Math Methods, Quantum, Stat Mech, and Nuclear. (Four of those six were taught by the same person, and if I had chosen an advisor based on common interests, I would have picked Tom. And I really liked Tom. It's just that Dennis and I had already bonded.) I liked it when things worked out interestingly, and I also liked putting my hands on the weirdness and making it go. That's something physics has up on fiction: the weirdness stays in your head, with fiction. Even when it's down on the page, it's weird in the heads of people. But when you've got one of the labs going that demonstrates quantum nature of reality, you can slowly change a voltage and watch charge quantization under your very own hands. You can make light behave like a wave and like a particle in the same hour, on the same lab bench. It's a shivery feeling, making the weirdness go. I don't know of anything like it. Maybe pregnancy will be -- making the weird with your own body -- but maybe it'll be a different feeling of weird-making. Couldn't tell you yet.
I also really liked physics culture when I was in it -- at least at Gustavus. For the first time in my life, I couldn't coast through my classes. Doing well meant something. There was always a way to do better. The only place I'd had that before was with writing, and writing was lonely. There was nowhere to flop down and go, "Gahhhh, that story kicked my ass!" and have somebody commiserate. In the physics office you could always collapse at your desk or into the ugly green chair: "That test kicked my ass!" "You always say that, and you always do fine. Now, me, on the other hand...." "Oh, yeah, sure, you. Hey, what are you doing this summer?" "I thought I'd try to work for Paul. You gonna?" "Love Paul, hate optics. I'm going to try to get an REU somewhere else." "Cool. Hey, is that Rutherford scattering almost done?" "Aaaaah, I forgot to reset the run!" [exeunt, at a run] Being a physics major came with camaraderie. It meant something. About every second professor I had outside the department would inform me solemnly that they'd heard that the two toughest departments on campus were physics and their own department. Having a hyperverbal physics major in class made the weaker of the profs quake; several of them blanched and muttered "oh God" or something about my advisor when I'd been asking too many questions in class and they found out I was a physics major.
My intro creative writing course was filled with people who wanted an easy A and people who were convinced of their own creativity but had no idea where to direct it or no intention of working at it. There were a very few exceptions, but we didn't have much in common for type of work or anything like that. My upperclass fiction studio was, if anything, worse: my classmates kept bugging the professor to tell them what to write about. They wanted assignments. They wanted to be told to write a four to ten page story about Florida. I had taken the class to have an official schedule spot for my writing in a busy semester. I bitterly resented the few intrusions my professor made into my own project schedule; he was wise and did not make many. I have no idea what he told the other kids in conferences -- maybe he told them to write 500 words about crustaceans or 2000 words about death.
And here I wrench my brain away from attempts to formulate 2500-word story about crustacean death, and that, ultimately, is the point. Not killing as many shrimp as possible, but that there is always a story in here, and behind the story is another story, and one of the scariest things in the world is my "starters" file, because it's got a million and one titles and ideas, and many of them spark other titles and ideas as I read them, and I get dazzled, and I will never get to them all.
My brain never did that in physics.
I don't know if it ought to, or if nobody's does, but the point is, it didn't, and it does with fiction. And there is only so much Mris to be had, and human relationships are really important to me -- more important than pretty math, even -- so it wasn't a good idea to take time and energy from them. And in part I backed myself into this corner -- my brain is full of bits of fiction in part because I feed it full of other bits of fiction, and because I trained it to go on, to work them out and not just have little snippets that sound great in your head and don't go anywhere. I didn't understand the implications of that decision at first. I didn't know that it would make physics pale for me, that I would eventually have to leave. I thought I could do both, and maybe I could have if I wanted nothing else of life, no friends beyond lab buddies, no family, nothing else. But there just wasn't enough of me to do both, and when that much was true --
Well. I wanted to say there was nothing I could have done. But there was. It's one angle on the heart of flesh/heart of stone story: it wouldn't have been like a faucet, but I think I could have turned the fiction off. I don't think it would have turned the physics on, though. I think I would have been giving up the ideas and the excitement and the frustration and the feelings of good work and all of that for a steady, middle-of-the-road job as a professor at a small college. There's nothing wrong with that work. It can be inspired work, as several of my profs demonstrated. It can be a real life's work, a calling, and not just a job. But I don't think it would have been that for me. I think something in me would have gone quiet that shouldn't go quiet. I don't regret keeping that something alive.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 01:54 pm (UTC)Adrian
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 02:03 pm (UTC)For ten years I thought I just generally wasn't an imaginative person. (I still think that, I guess. I'm much more reactive most of the time.) For those ten years I was also deliberately not writing fiction. It's very strange to have to adjust to seeing myself as at least narrowly imaginative and creative now that I'm writing again.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 02:08 pm (UTC)I should probably add that my grad experience was not what it could have been -- the program was distinctly subpar -- so that probably made it easier for me to spot the problem instead of flailing around indefinitely.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 04:37 pm (UTC)I long ago realized that the most important aspect of being a facilitator is helping people figure out what they want to write about. Oddly, at the class I taught last week, not one person asked me for ideas, despite my clearly stating several times, "If you do not know what to write about, see me after class."
Weird.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 07:04 pm (UTC)Maybe she was right, but it was a compliment that had a horrible edge to it. If it was true, I felt she was doing an enormous disservice to the rest of the students in the class by lumping them as "non-writer" status.
The difference between someone who is a writer and someone who isn't is based on whether or not they write. Anyone can be a writer. Only a select few become authors.
I believe everyone has something to say, and that the skills students pick up, even in writing fiction, can be useful in other areas of their life. However, creative writing is rarely taught pragmatically. It does tend to be very assignment based. The most important thing a facilitator can do is to help people decide what it is they want to communicate, and how to do that most effectively.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 08:19 pm (UTC)I think one of the main reasons I object to labeling a class "non-writers" is that people change with time. Some people who have nothing at all to say in that class might sit down and write an engaging novel 10, 20, 40 years later. Hard to say.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 08:32 pm (UTC)Nope.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 05:37 pm (UTC)(Also and more importantly because I always want to know what things are for. "You can bounce an electron off a surface and it can go in one of two directions? Great! What can you do with it? What does it demonstrate? Nothing? Oh...." <= my side of a conversation with an actual physics grad student, a while back.)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 06:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 07:01 pm (UTC)I think I'm just impatient with experiments that aren't there to solve a problem, whether that be practical or just "how does this principle work?" What bothered me most in the example with the particle bouncing off a surface was that the guy not only couldn't explain what it was for, he couldn't explain what it showed or what principle applied or could apply. I keep hopnig he was just not good at explaining, because otherwise some university is spending an awful lot of money to bounce particles off surfaces for no particular reason.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 08:22 pm (UTC)I suspect that the grad student was not very good at communicating. Many physicists are not so much with the verbal skills.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 09:03 pm (UTC)But he did have the Coolest Senior Project ever, relating to bouncing a laser off a window to determine from its vibrations what people in the room were saying.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 01:25 pm (UTC)What I'm saying is that creative people use what they have, and maybe your current life is giving you more, not fewer, opportunities to use your creativity in the future -- even independent of raising a bunch of bright, healthy kids.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 03:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-23 03:32 am (UTC)Actually, on second thought, I'll put it as an entry in my journal, so you won't be the only one who reads it. Thus: link to entry here. The short form: My brain does do that in physics. Or it used to, until the drudgery of finishing my dissertation apparently put that muse in hibernation. Sigh.
One of the ironies is that I'd like to write fiction, but while my idea generator is passably good at pieces of fictional worlds, it's not so good at characters and plot.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-23 08:49 pm (UTC)