So.. umm...
I did survive my first week back at real school. I wasn't really sure if I would for a minute there. It had me in the first half, I'm not gonna lie. Happy to report that I'm still alive and haven't died just yet. My schedule is quite terrible and I have no time to think about anything other than my homework problems, work, and taking notes, but I try to squeeze in some fun stuff here and there.
I will explain in more detail in a future email, but for now, it sufficeth to say that I have increased my work responsibilities tenfold. I was reinstated to my research position and am now in charge of more than usual at the BYU Career Services office. I'm sure it will be enjoyable. My research focus this month is about preparing for the highlight of January (and probably February too, screw you Valentine's Day): the quantum hackathon at MIT. I am excited to go to try my skills with other motivated undergraduate students and I am impressed that this event is actually happening. I don't feel like I get out much besides the occasional study abroad, so the opportunity to take a short trip somewhere will be refreshingly different. It will also be odd to travel with just a carryon, but it'll be kinda fun to see how little I can survive off of. I booked my flights a couple days ago and I think everything is ready to go, so stay tuned for how that goes. I'm not promising anything.
Math = hard work. I think proof-based math is hardest for me because you have to know exactly where you're allowed to start and where you're not. Physics = hard work. This is a different kind of work because it is intense and complicated, but the problem is usually pretty well defined. It's just up to you to figure out how to get what you want. You also get to decide what you want, which is sometimes nice. You probably don't care about any of that, so I'll stop talking about that. I have been learning about knowing my audience in my business writing class, and this entire paragraph was just a clever segway to get to that instead.
I am taking Management Communications from the fantastic Kristin McQuivey and I am very excited for that course. It is my first in the Tanner Building (business school). I won't say that stereotypes are true... but I won't tell you you're wrong for thinking that. I walked into class and there was a kid in a three-piece suit who looked like he had cut his hair that day. This kid seemed as though he belonged in a movie like Wolf of Wall Street (obviously rated much lower, c'mon, I would never have watched something so deplorable). Not in a bad way or a good way, just in a way. He spoke as though he were permanently stuck in a business meeting, which made me laugh a little bit. It definitely isn't my style, but hey, you do you man from MCOM.
Basically, I hate being back. Okay, hate is a strong word. But I do miss France. I don't get to just do what I want anymore, I have to deal with people again and have responsibilities and can't just live in a perpetual state of exploration and curiosity. Well, I suppose I can intellectually, but that gets tiring after about hour number 0. This semester, I have work or class starting at 10 am all the way through 7pm on Mondays, 8pm on Tuesday, and 5 all the other days. How do I stay sane, you ask? I don't know. I am hoping to figure that out. I keep a planner with all of my assignments and I work ahead when I can. I am sure that I will be ready for a break come April.
I got one such break today, actually. Usually a good break consists of something that 1. entertains me, 2. makes me laugh, and 3. requires minimal brain power. Today I got a message from an account I didn't know on Instagram, and they were very clearly trying to catfish me. I messed with them for about an hour before they eventually quit responding. It is fun to be a mirror and just ask them all the questions that you refuse to answer. "what city do you live in? i wanna know if we're close" becomes "well what city do yooouu live in? cause i wanna know if we're close but i can't tell you where i am". Then you watch as they get increasingly pissed off at you for not complying with their slightly concerning demands. I love making scammers upset. It's one of my favorite hobbies.
You know what actually upset me this week? Watching a religion professor make fun of a girl in class for having questions and disagreeing with the professor's points when he asked her to explain how she felt. I can't imagine how humiliated this girl felt as the professor got the whole class to laugh at how dumb her question was (it wasn't, although I never would have asked it), then try to argue her way back to a level of competence. The most frustrating thing of all was to see someone in a position of power lack the proper maturity to say, "if you're still stuck on this, let's talk after class about it," especially when it was such a small thing to argue over that was completely unimportant to the curriculum for the day. Or he could have said, "I can see we have different opinions, can we agree to disagree and move on?" No. He had to prove his opinion was the only option and that all others were so bad that the entire auditorium should laugh at them. Safe to say, I dropped his class.
Allow me to combine this with some of my learnings in the physics world. Don't worry, I'll stick to Stephen Hawking's mantra of making science easy to understand for the normal person. He understood a lot. He didn't stand under much, though. Anyway, I've learned in my physics studies that when you do things at a large scale, you can have definite answers. Things can be black and white for a large group of things. For example, if I throw a ball at my brother (a common occurrence), it will move through the air and either hit him, or it won't. It will obviously hit him because I have superior throwing abilities, but I digress. In another sense, when a population is faced with a question, there can be a generally correct answer. Sometimes those answers are hard to find, and perhaps that is what all the fuss is about. The reason for this definition tends to be the result of an average. When you add up the paths of all of the options together, the most common one is the one that occurs. When I throw that ball, some of the particles in it do miss my brother. Some of them fly away to the sun. However, when the many moles (a really big number) of molecules within the ball are given a chance to take a path from a set of initial conditions, they are just gonna take the one that's most likely to happen.
Weirdly enough, physics tends to describe non-physical phenomena fairly often. Humanity's course just tends towards what is most likely to occur. We don't have war all the time because that isn't very sustainable, and there aren't very many futures where a world constantly at war exists. That's why we're not in them. You may have heard that the universe tends towards disorder, and there is a very intuitive and simple reason for it. How many ways are there for a glass to remain unshattered? Just one. How many ways are there for a glass to shatter? Well, the answer isn't clear anymore because it is all over the floor. Over the course of the glass' lifetime, it will tend towards being broken. How many ways are there to have a truly peaceful world? We have to hope that there is more than one, or we are just never going to get there.
The summing of different chances and just seeing what happens is actually at the heart of something called Fourier analysis, which is simply the addition of different waves and the new one they produce. When you add up (let them interfere with one another) all of the different wave functions that describe how something moves, they tend to eventually settle on what is most common among them all. Come find me in the BYU library if you want a more complicated explanation.
You may find yourself asking the immediately interesting question: what if we only look at a really short time? or what if we make the thing we're looking at really small? This is precisely what I wanted to talk about. For our purposes, those two questions are practically the same thing, although there are some fundamental differences that we will ignore. When you zoom all the way in on something, it no longer exists as a yes or a no. It is made up of yes and no. It can be mostly yes, a little no; half yes, half no, or any other combination of yes and no. And guess what? If you blink and look again, it will be different. Not because the object itself has changed, but because you have. You've both moved forward in time, which advanced the wave in this really cool thing called phase, and now it just looks different. What makes it yes/no, right/wrong, good/bad is what it does in the long term. In other words, it matters what happens when you put it in its place and let it run its course.
Shift your thinking away from physical particles and atom diagrams and other confusing things. Picture a person. More specifically, think of a difficult choice that this person has to make. Maybe they just found out their friend's boyfriend is cheating on them. Should they tell someone? They are just like a qubit, which is a neat way to describe these fractional yes/no things. In this one moment, they will judge what is happening around them and weigh their odds: some percent yes, some percent no. Eventually, they have to choose and collapse their probabilities into one choice, but they are always able to choose either up until that decision is made. Let's pretend that on this day, they choose yes. They could choose no tomorrow (although that wouldn't help them any), but more importantly, they could also choose no the next time they have to choose. Their yes/no probabilities will likely fluctuate over time, and may even be totally opposite based on what information they have available to them. Only when they are given the chance to make a choice a thousand times can you really evaluate how they stand and what they value.
Sometimes you don't have time to waste. You could ask a thousand people the question and then see how they answer. Then you can say, on average, people chose this yes x percent of the time. They were more or less likely to choose no than yes under certain circumstances. When you add more people, you can see what they are like as a group and you can better guess at how one person might feel.
I basically just taught you quantum mechanics in 4 paragraphs. If you made it this far, I am sure you are thinking "what the heck does this have to do with anything?" Well, there are a few hecks that this has to do with.
One of them is the heck that in one particular moment, a single choice is never black and white. It is always a continuous spectrum of pros and cons and some will be much easier to choose than others. The only thing that has any statistical significance is what happens in the long run. Ask yourself which choice you made most often after the 50th time and compare that with what you think a "good choice" is. Do it a thousand times before you declare which is good and which is bad. You have to try different scenarios to figure it out because odds are that you don't know. This also works for groups. When a large group of people chooses to support something, we can evaluate whether or not that was the correct choice and if we align with our own standards of good as a whole. If we're not happy, that means we chose wrong overall and have to try again.
Another is the heck I live in by attending BYU and living in Provo. The odds of finding people who think like me and believe like I do are low, because the group represents the most common among them. My peers in this one particular school in this one particular state tend to support one particular set of ideas, so those are going to be the people I am most likely to meet. This is true in any group with an overarching set of beliefs. It is unlikely (but not impossible) that you could find someone who is a member of the church but believes nothing. It is unlikely that you will find someone who believes that the earth is flat but the moon is round. It is unlikely that I will find someone who cares about what I care about and isn't something like me. It is just a statistical thing. They don't determine outcomes, they skew them. I often feel a bit out of place at this school because I know that if I was asked to compare myself with the group average, I would be pretty far from it. Not in a positive or negative way, just a way. This is especially scary for things like dating, since my odds are just so low when the distribution is so narrow. I write that to say if you feel that way, don't worry. It's just a statistical thing and it isn't you. Okay, it might be you. You should probably get some advice.
Anyway, I'm exhausted and I have work in the morning, but I felt that was important enough to say. Hopefully I can be forgiven for being late again.
Signing off,
-Will
PS. Martin Luther King Jr Day countdown begins
PPS. I'm back on the flip phone so if I don't answer you on Instagram or Facebook, that's why, let me know if you need my number
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