The Scientist

From benzene rings and pure handwritten logic, we’ve leapt to computers and algorithms. Somewhere in between my courses, my personal life and my far-fetched ambitions, my love for science was lost.

Will I ever feel you again? I ask myself, I ask my fascinations. My aspirations.

Some days I want to lay down, look into the sky and – like one dot connecting the other into a constellation – have an epiphany, but I’d settle for a good research question to pursue. I found myself asking if I am in the right field? This was the path laid down for me – consciously, sub-consciously or completely out of my control. What am I to do with what’s given to me?

Should I have not chosen a brain over an atom? I can’t specialise; there’s so much more to see. Non-hermitian matrices and ad initio methods, plasticity and anxiety; am I in the wrong field or am I romanticising a field that is already romanticised?

Physics, simply put, is the study of the universe. Dark academia, as we young adults like to call it these days, is built upon a ‘physicist’ and the books they carry, the notes they make, the papers they read and blackboards – big, beautiful blackboards. Versatility is the most satiating feeling for a scientist, take my word for it.

What sates you in biology, then?

I don’t know. A biologist’s study can span from astrobiology to medical sciences. Brains built from observing brains, and behaviour in animals studied and linked to humans. Drawing phylogenetic trees and studying bacteria; engineering new bacteria and studying rat basal ganglia. But I’ve stopped seeing glamour in code. I think I’ve hit a dead end.

I am not an engineer. Somewhere in getting my machine to learn and predict, I’ve forgotten to learn myself.

Some days I want to be lost with a bowl of fruit and a blackboard, chalking equations and proofs and flowcharts and models. I pull my hair back with dusty hands and I feel... satisfied. I chose pure science so that I could never grow up. I don’t want to grow up. I want to be as fascinated by neutrophils and nucleophilicity ten years down the line as I was four years ago. Eyes glistened over with wonder, and a mind hungry to know.

Call it romance or call it what you will. I’m not sure what I envision science to be is wrong. Maybe I fear what I don’t know, or maybe I fear a possibility of not knowing more.