I may not be able to climb to the top of physics, but I think I may be able to share my enthusiasm and knowledge to our children who might stand on the top of physics someday. That will always be my wish.
Physics
I must be a liar if I tell you that I love physics since I was born. How could I love someone if I know nothing about her or him? I believe that most of the things in our universe are the consequences of a sequence of unpredictable coincidences. But wait, why I use “most of the things” instead of “everything”? That is because there exists, undoubtedly, something that we can predict. Example, everyone dies someday. This belief is actually consistent to the knowledge of nowadays physicists; one can hardly to predict the next position of a Brownian particle exactly, yet the average displacement of the Brownian particle increases linearly with the time. In other words, our world is formed by a deterministic evolution which is composed with vast number of random events.
I chose physics to be my main subject in college because I want to invent a time machine so that I can travel back into the past to fix some regretful things.
I was born on 24 March 1977. I grow up in a small village called Elephant village in Malaysia. From the name of village, one could expect neither time machine nor physics but only primitive forest which actually a wonderful place for hide-and-seek (if lucky, you might meet an elephant!). I have two younger sisters. My mother is a good housekeeper, and my father works hard to grow us up.
When I was about 11 years old, I found an amazing law at the day my grand grandmother passed away. Everyone dies someday, including me unexceptionably. I was so scared and start to think problems maturely, sometime even over pessimistically. Since biology was the first lecture which provides the knowledge about life that I was taught in school, I was attracted by it and hoped to be a doctor in future who can prevent death. Ironically, my respected teacher’s baby died because a doctor was suspected to give an improper injection. I lost my faith on doctor since that event happened. Later, I heard the story about Einstein’s train from my physics teacher. He said that time on a fast-moving train is slower. If one can move on the speed of light his time will stop. Exceeding the speed of light, the time flow might even be reversed!
I love this idea. If I can reverse the time flow, I might be able to stop those happened tragedies. If I can reverse the time flow, I might be able to live forever in this universe!
In the small town I live, I could not find any textbook about Einstein’s theory of special relativity. But I did gain some interesting information that there are some scientists studying in the possibility of time machine seriously in this world! I decided to be a physicist since that moment.
My father certainly does not know what the physics is, neither the time machine. Like most of the family in Malaysia, he is more concern about when I can earn some money to support our family. It was difficult to ask him to shoulder my university fee at that time. So, I worked in Singapore for one year after I graduated from high school and earned enough money to pay the first-year university fee. Year of 1997, September, I stepped inside the campus of ChungHsing university and started my journey in physics.
A famous science fiction author, Mr. Lee Hwa Yeh, said that the more physics one learns the more difficult for one to write a science fiction. After I had learned quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, I realized that the problem of time machine only preserved to the top clever people in the world. And even those terrible intelligent physicists think that the problem of time machine may not totally be solved in my grand-grand-grandson’s age. My time traveling dream was awakened. However, the training of physics has grown me up. I love physics now no longer because of the time machine but the knowledge of our real world that attracts my curiosity to dig deeper and deeper. I had learned how to use different angles to view our world, how to appreciate the joy of sharing knowledge. Like someone finally found his religion, because of physics I am not afraid of death anymore. Life is an interesting self-assembling process and death is just a natural entropy process from ordering to disordering.
I may not be able to climb to the top of physics, but I think I may be able to share my enthusiasm and knowledge to our children who might stand on the top of physics someday. That will always be my wish.
一百年後就不會有人知道的事 