I am so ashamed
Well, today I did something mildly productive. Before I get into that, I want to point out that there is something very interesting and significant in the news recently. Here is a link:
General Relativity vs. Dark Matter
For those of you who don’t already know, General Relativity is a legacy from our old friend, Albert Einstein, and has shaped much of modern physics. General Relativity is a theory, and even Einstein predicted that it won’t be the final say in our understanding of the universe. However, like any good theory, it has the following benefits. No known phenomena currently contradict it. It can (and has) been used to predict (or explain) phenomena that had not been observed (or explained) prior to the proposal of General Relativity.
Dark Matter, on the other hand, was a recent guess as to why certain phenomena in the universe behaved as observed. Dark Matter (and Dark Energy) are concepts that pretty well galvanized the scientific community. On one hand, you have a phenomena that can’t be explained easily (Galaxial Rotation, to be specific). On one hand, if we assume that there is some hitherto unknown quantity in the universe, that behaves in just the right fashion, everything works out nice. The problem here, is that it becomes difficult to extrapolate what other phenomena this Dark stuff might cause, and no one has ever observed any other phenomena that might lend it support. So, you have some scientists hoping that it exists, because then there is this new thing to explore, and face it, it makes the universe work right. Naturally you have some other scientists who disagree with making stuff up just because it would be interesting and it helps avoid some difficult math.
You may guess that I count myself among the latter class of scientists. The reason I am happy; Some smart folks over at CERN have explained the tricky phenomena that Dark Matter was expected to solve, using General Relativity, one of the most solid theories in science today (especially for cosmology). We no longer need to try and explain how this mystery Dark Matter can exist, without wrecking the entire existing understanding of the universe. Instead, we can rely on an old reliable friend, General Relativity… This is a great triumph for science.
You may not care. That’s okay. Consider this. All of the dollars that were ear-marked to detect or create dark matter can now go to more worthwhile studies… Like proving that General Relativity really does explain why galaxies spin the way they do.
Anyhoo. I have this dark secret… For some reason, my Mom has saved every award I ever got, and even went so far as to frame most of them. For reasons unknown to me, I have always been deeply ashamed of this. For some reason, to hang such awards seems overly boastful, and I just don’t think it is right. I certainly don’t have the wall space to hang some 40 odd certificates ranging from scholarship certificates to honor roll placements.
For some reason, among the boxes of things that made it out here, was the box of all these awards. I did not want to look at them here any more than in any other place I’ve lived, so they stayed in a neglected pile. Then, today, I had a revelation.
Why am I ashamed of these certificates? I don’t need to be ashamed of being modestly successful. I’ve gotten an award or two in my day, and rather than being ashamed of them, I should be proud that I was able to do well, and that someone was kind enough to recognize it. In fact, it is mildly insulting to the folks who gave out these awards that I am hiding them. So, I hung them proudly in every room in my house, and now there will be something else to talk about when people visit… Me.
No. Actually what I did was I removed each and every award from the frames that Mom was kind enough to contribute. Next, I put them in chronological order, so that could feel like I was organized. My next step, get a photo album or something, and put them all within. This way, if some wacko actually wants to see a stack of papers that somehow demonstrate that at times, I’ve been known to excel, they can. If not, they’ll never know what lies within the book. If I’m having a bad day, feeling foolish, silly, or just down, I can look at my book of awards and think “Wow, I sure did fool those suckers.”
In reality, I think it is a happy medium. I’m not about to throw out all those papers, but I don’t really see a need to post them prominently. This way, they’re available for perusal, but they’ll likely end up neglected on a book shelf, rather than neglected in a heap that is likely to get wrecked and broken.
Go science! And me!