I am a scientist I seek to understand me

Hey man. I've decided I'm going to make a concerted effort to stop using the word 'gay' to mean sucky.

Anyway, I just got out of our technology interchange meeting (TIM), which kind of blew my mind. As an engineer, I rarely work with scientists. By the time engineering work gets to me, it's been filtered down pretty far, so far that I've never really met a physicist in the work world. Well, with this new project I'm in early enough that I have to deal directly with them. The meeting was very educational, but being me, I learned something interesting about science.

Science is the reduction of data. I know scientists often create theories but what the vast majority of scientists do is reduce data. I think maybe the reason this comes to mind is that I've always been infuriated by easy to read science books that describe the universe or complex physical laws using plain language. These books make it seem like anyone can comprehend science. I never really understood why in the world I had a reaction to it, but today I realized it's because I personally don't have a scientific mind, and have some weird chip on my shoulder because of my knowledge that I don't and I can't get it.

Science, I think also intrinsically, is the search to understand the universe. That sounds bombastic, but this is what science/math is. The movie the matrix touches on this superficially, the fact that all human interaction and experience can be programmed and shown as a mathematical solution. This is, I believe, true. There is likely an equation that can describe the soul. Every single thing you sense is a math. Everything, theoretically, can be predicted. Every behavior and phenomenon is math.

But you want to know the truth about this stuff? Not only is it pretty much incomprehensible, it's also boring and grinding as fuck. I mean, statisticians write these fascinating things about what they've discovered, but to actually read through and make sense of the data is horrible! I'd much rather surf the web and read about how blue jeans are made than swim through a million lines of data.

Man, I could go on and on, but this is starting to get a little incoherent. Anyways, school should take me about 3 years, because I'm going to try to take at least one class every semester including summer, and I need ten classes. Some semesters I'll have to take two classes.

I'm stopping here. I'm going home. I've got schoolwork to do, blah.

I am a lost soul I shoot myself on rock and roll. Man, that line about blue jeans shows what a slacker I am, damn.