Journeys for Knowledge

As I promised in my inaugural post on this blog, I won’t be updating on a regular schedule because sometimes there just isn’t enough to write about. After taking time to reflect on the last week and a half, I finally have something worth saying. It is quite common to see people complain about having too much work, but there is also a danger in having too little work as well. Without a goal for the mind to focus on, it can become lost and listless, and fall into a fit of apathy. This is precisely what happened to mine as I struggled to find research tasks to do. My supervisor did not intend to hold me back, but until I start working with actual devices in January there is no clear direction in where I should be focusing my efforts.

Thankfully on Friday we agreed I should go ahead with attempting some simulations of my own design, and with the right parameters from a fellow graduate student, it will be possible to simulate the devices I will be testing and extract useful results. The prospect of a real challenge again was quite uplifting, and reminded just how dangerous boredom can be for a mind as active as mine.

That is not to say that I have been doing absolutely nothing with my time. There is still plenty of time to join other students in the evening for various activities, from playing foosball to eating fudge to watching fireworks and bonfires in celebration of a failed terrorist (Guy Fawkes). I have also officially joined my club in Cambridge (though they call them societies here), the Chinese Classics Society. Once every couple weeks we meet and read an except from Laozi’s Dao de ching, one of the definitive ancient texts on Daoism, before discussing its meaning. While I am truly interested in the material, the discussion also gives me a chance to exercise part of my brain that is often ignored in the lab, for which I am very grateful. I may always choose science for my chief profession, but the limits of science’s knowledge are the foundation of the humanities’s creativity.

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