Opposition in all Things

So, from my last post it looks like I promised to write a new post a few weeks ago. Obviously, this did not happen. I have been quite busy with life in general; taxes, research, class, TA duties, and yard work…you get the idea. Yup, you heard right, I said yard work. It has been warm as of late and I have been turning the soil over in my garden. I meant to get early crops in but time was not to be found. I have been really busy in the lab, learning a new programming language, Java. Programming is quite simple, all you are doing is telling the computer to take input from the user and if that input is some action, such as a right-click, then do thing A. There are really only a very few primitive commands that you need to make a program, quite amazing. I have been busy doing other school activities too, class and TA responsibilities (A.K.A. thermodynamics and grading).

You may ask then, what do I do when I am not in lab or doing the school thing? I do bike but not a lot. When I get done with the day I usually go home trying ever so hard to keep school and lab things behind. One thing I do not do when I get home is sit in front of the TV; I can’t stand TV. Instead I read. Since I am a great believer in opposition in all things, I have chosen to read Stephen Hawking’s ‘A brief History of Time.’ How does this introduce opposition? Quit simply really. You see, as a student of structural biology I am working in a world where measurements are made on the angstrom scale. An angstrom is a whole magnitude of order less than a nanometer! Certainly almost all have heard of a nanometer but that doesn’t mean that you have an intuition of how small that is. Let me try to instill some intuition about the nanometer and then the angstrom.

I will assume you are familiar with the length of a meter. One tenth of a meter is a decimeter (or 0.1 meter) and one tenth of a decimeter (or one one-hundredth of a meter if you’d like) is a centimeter (or 0.01 meter). Approximately 2.5 centimeters is the length of an inch (this will be the only reference I will give to the cockamamie U.S. convention of length measurement). So, a tenth of a tenth of a meter is a centimeter. Are you with me so far? Good. A tenth of a centimeter is a millimeter (or a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a meter or 0.001 meter). Now think of a human hair, the average size of which is a tenth of a millimeter, pretty small!

This will be the last reference of anything observable to the human eye as anything smaller is fairly difficult, if not impossible, to see with the naked eye. We’ve come a long way but the millimeter is not even half way to the angstrom! Go down three orders of magnitude from a millimeter and you’ll arrive at the micrometer (or 0.000 001 meter). Lets jump down ANOTHER three orders of magnitude, we’ve now arrived at the nanometer (or 0.000 000 001 meter). Recap: three orders of magnitude below meter is millimeter, three more orders down is the micrometer, and three orders down still is the nanometer. Now we go just one order of magnitude below the nanometer and we finally arrive at the angstrom (1 angstrom = 0. 000 000 000 1meter). I hope you followed; my goal was simply to underscore the fact that I am constantly thinking in these small lengths within my research and schoolwork too.

I have yet to answer the question that brought on that rant, why does reading ‘A Brief History of Time’ introduce opposition at all into my life? Well, you see, being a theoretical astrophysicist and all Stephen Hawking tends to write about length scales that are, quite literally, astronomically big. It is nice to come home and peek into another world where people are always thinking about large distances rather than small distances, as I do.

Opposition is like taking a break from a grueling run. It does not only feels amazing but is essential for physical and mental health. Did I just compare my research to a grueling run? Yes, yes I did. I’m ok with that.