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Fall 2016 Was a Term of Incredible Events, and Even More Incredible Physics Students

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Fall 2016 Was a Term of Incredible Events, and Even More Incredible Physics Students Fall 2016 was a term of incredible events, and even more incredible physics students. That’s right, after a long wait, Physclub has gotten some sweet sweet shirts. Now we can all rep our program, so everyone on campus can know why we look so sleep deprived. Co-hosted with Femphys, The Physics Declassified First Year Survival Guide featured panelists Laura, Fiorella, Sam, Orion, Silas, and Heather representing Applied Math, MNS, astrophys, honours phys, math phys, and geophys respectively. First year, first semester. I’d entered into my undergrad degree in physics four months ago; wide- eyed and smiling, I’d been eagerly awaiting the new kind of universe to be opened before me as I learned from the brightest minds humanity had to offer. But that was four months ago. Now, the four months flashed before my eyes like I was facing my own death as I sat in the exam room, the title on that godforsaken packet of paper staring back at me: PHYS 121 FINAL EXAM. With shaking hands, I wrote my name, praying to all the deities in all the Heavens, Hells, and Earths in every parallel universe, that I’d at least spelled that right. If there was a God, I reasoned, They’d at least allow that, right? I found myself returning to that thought over and over again throughout the next two and a half hours of what can only be described as the destruction of my heart and soul on the most fundamental of levels. Because, really, that’s the point of one’s first physics final, right? They’d already spent the entire first semester breaking down all that you were before, and your physics final was just the final, definitive blast at the foundations of the person you were B.P.—Before Physics. It was the ripping apart of the atoms that made up the hopes and dreams within your soul. It was knocking the electrons within you off their spins. It was the cataclysmic nuclear fission of the fundamentals of who you were happening in your mind, in the pit of your stomach, in your heart and happiness and emotions. That’s the point of making you sit the PHYS 121 final when you’d already been dragged by the scruff through Mastering Physics Hell and kicked in the teeth by your first Saturday midterm, isn’t it? At least, it certainly felt that way as I turned the page and tried in vain to understand the first question.Rotational motion, I thought to myself. I know that. I swear to God I know that. I have to take a surface integral here, or maybe switch to polar coordinates. The cold claws of dread sunk themselves into the pit of my stomach as I realized I didn’t know how to do that—why would I? I’d only finished one semester of university calculus, and that was mainly spent trying to get everyone on the same page, trying to fast track all the things Ontario curriculum was supposed to teach us, but didn’t. I made a mental note as I wrote down the equation for the conservation of energy, instead, to send the Ministry of Education a strongly worded letter afterwards.This is so stupid, I thought. This is so fucking stupid. This is so many different levels of stupid that I’d need all the calculus they didn’t teach me in high school just to keep track of them all. Amended the mental note to just send the Ministry a copy of this final exam instead, my failing grade highlighted, with a note written on the cover, kindly inviting them to go fuck themselves. Who the fuck decided we didn’t need to learn integrals in high school? Who was that fucking dumbass and where can I find them? Question after question, and the numbers began to blur together into one. They swam off the page and curled into the air which buzzed with the fear of sixty children—God, mere children—all facing their own mortality, going on their own spiritual journeys, finding their own concept of morality and the meaning of life, throughout this final. They danced around me like the shadow of Peter Pan. My pencil snapped two pages ago from the ferocity with which I’d been drawing these goddamn free-body diagrams. I’d been writing in my tears since then. I registered dimly that I began to slip into a trance—that my unconscious self was being raised into another dimension where apparently solving algebraic systems of equations was a viable alternative to multivariable calculus. I forgot all that I held near and dear. The entire universe ceased to exist outside of that exam room. The sun had cooled to a cold, dense rock in the sky. The moon was an egg in the sky and clouds were made of math. God was a partial derivative. “Ten minutes left,” the proctor said. I blinked, suddenly thrown back into my body. I remembered where I was, what I was doing, the death threats I’d been crafting in my mind as I found the mass of a bullet shot into a block of wood that behaved as a pendulum. I still had two questions half answered. I swallowed the rage building within me. Murder isn’t the answer here, I reminded myself. Isn’t it…? No. Are you sure? That’s irrelevant. I scribbled down some bullshit kind of answer for each of the questions and closed the exam like closing the last chapter on the wide-eyed little girl I used to be. Let the TA collect my paper without making direct eye contact. To this day, I still wonder what it must have been like for that TA grading my final—how many shots did they have to take before getting to the end of it? How much did they question my sanity; fear for the future of science, or just wonder what the fuck the physics department had become that they’d let this idiot into their program? If you’re reading this, you poor, unfortunate soul who had to attempt to figure out that piping hot mess of a 121 final, truly, I apologize. I’m so sorry for everything I put you through. You deserve the world for not failing me the moment you noticed my numbers and letters were starting to be turned backwards. I stumbled blindly out of the exam room, gripping the wall to stay upright. Which way was up? I couldn’t be sure. I was still thinking in numbers. English was still being filtered through a screen of calculus so that “Have a good Christmas” sounded like a demand to take the derivative with respect to time. I nodded and nearly fell down the four flights of stairs, out the door and into the outside world. I let myself pause for a moment, though, taking a deep breath of the cool, crisp winter air. I’d survived. I’d at least done that. It was over, but God, at what cost? Well, I know the cost now, 1 year A.P.—After Physics. The cost was the person I was before writing that exam. Before truly entering physics. That was my induction into what it really meant to be a part of Phys Club. I walked on home to drink myself stupid have a nice long nap alcohol is never the answer, children. I wondered if any of my other classmates had the kind of existential crisis I did during that exam. I wondered if they could tell I was having an existential crisis. And as I left campus that day, I wondered when the existential crisis would end. That was a year ago, though. God is still a partial derivative. -Taken from Phys Study Room Wait, this dude got a letter from Einstein? Phys 10 seminars. To me, this was an hour every Tuesday spent sitting in the ill designed, tiny desked, small chaired, dear lord how does anyone over five foot in length find this amount of leg room comfortable lecture hall that is Arts Lecture. So why did I chose to endure this hour of discomfort. Well, it started out as a form of procrastination. But soon enough, the lectures actually became very interesting and enjoyable, and this term featured my favorite lecture yet, “ John Moffat: When Einstein Wrote Back”. I didn’t know what to expect going into this seminar but I was not disappointed. First of all, arriving as I usually arrive to everything: tired, half-conscious, coffee in one hand, food in the other, and (unsurprisingly for those who know me) about 5-10 minutes late, I noticed the lecture hall to be VERY full of people. So I begin, clumsily traversing the narrow pathways, losing my balance (consequently cursing), and finally reaching my friends, their faces showing mild embarrassment at the resultant association with me. I sit down and notice,…”hey these aren’t just undergrads”. From classmates, to grad students, TA’s I recognize, and a row full of professors, everyone is sitting at the edge of their chairs eager to hear the stories to come. And so he begins, recounting the story of how he became a physicist. It’s the normal story everyone can relate to (<- sarcasm). Working as an artist in Paris and deciding “hey, y’know what’s pretty cool, that math and physics stuff”, John Moffat decided to casually hit up the library and TEACH HIMSELF calculus.
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