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SCIENCE

Murkrow

Murkrow

Says "also" and "or something" a lot
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I sort of enjoyed past threads about what everyone studies at uni and why, so I thought I'd make a thread about SCIENCE. I didn't want to make a thread on something really specific like maths with I do but I didn't make it too general like "talk about what you're studying" or bumping an old one because there are so many different subjects that people might talk over each other so if you're doing history or something you can make your own thread if you want!
I know "science" is quite general but so is everything if you look into it enough. It's like a fractal!

I would suggest an initial topic to discuss but one of the reasons I enjoyed the past threads was talking about the stuff we studied, so to start I'll ask what the sciencey people here study and why!

I do maths and I constantly change whether I'm more interested in pure or applied. Pure stuff is cool because pretty much everything you prove can be understood even if it isn't very interesting, but applied stuff is cool because you can apply it.
The sciences I've always been more interested in are physics and computer science so I tend towards physical applied things and number theoretical pure things. Sometimes I regret not studying either of those two but ultimately I think doing maths is a good middle ground. That's not to say physicsy/computery things are the only maths I do. I'd quite enjoy analysis if I knew what the frig was going on.

So what kinds of science do you all do/enjoy doing?
 
I absolutely love studying astronomy and physics. As far as astronomy goes, though, I have fallen a bit out of practice, but I've got Science Olympiad starting up soon so I'll be studying it more.
 
I find psychological sciences and quantum physics really interesting. Astronomy too. The vastness of space is pretty mindblowing.
 
The power of Science is amazing! Now we can trade with anyone all over the world!

Honestly, I prefer Physics, but other sciences are better than people think (except biology).
 
Qvalador said:
I find psychological sciences and quantum physics really interesting. Astronomy too. The vastness of space is pretty mindblowing.
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Maybe I'm weird but I don't think I've ever really been able to comprehend the vastness of space. It's probably more mindblowing to me just how bad I am at understanding how big or small numbers can be. If you gave me two numbers I could easily tell you which was bigger but once they get above like 1000 I don't really have a good frame of reference for imagining them. If someone asked me to imagine a crowd of 1000 people and a crowd of 10^100 people, there probably wouldn't be much of a difference in my head.

So when I'm told there's a star a certain number of lightyears away or was first formed some number of millions of years ago, all I hear are the numbers. I don't fully grasp just how massive or old things are.
 
Neuroscience! I'm taking a cognitive science class this semester and it's pretty cool. If I go into the sciences, I definitely want to do neuro research.

What's exciting is how little we know. I heard the other day that more research has been done in brain science in the past decade than all the rest combined. It's an fascinating, exploding field. I've pretty much decided that I would want to work on the level of individual neurons, toying with them in my mind and figuring out what they can do from the bottom up, instead of looking at larger groups of neurons like they do when they take fMRI's.

But what excites me most is when very different fields relate to one another. There's nothing like the feeling I get when knowledge collides with each other. The other morning I was having coffee with a couple professors and we talked about the philosophy of art, how it relates to history, architecture, and neuroscience, and I remember a key piece of information I contributed regarding neuroscience came from my video game design textbook. Then last night I was talking to my dad, who teaches cultural communication at another university, about how culture and worldview filter in some information and out other information, about how language plays a role in determining how we think, about the connotation of words being what a word is actually made of whereas denotations are abstract, and how that relates to a debate I entered in neuroscience taking the position that cognitive science should be attempting to build cognitive models without rich symbolic representations.
Tl;dr I love it when it's like a mosh pit and everything collides!
 
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psychology and chemistry

though i'm a music major so the only one that really applies to my life is psych (psych minor)
 
Yes! Science! One of my favorite subjects!

Physics, Theoretical Physics, and Quantum physics are all fun to throw around (except when somebody forces it into your head).
Psychology and neurology are interesting.

I guess the sciences I tend to focus on the most are Computer Sciences and Materials Science and Engineering. My favorite thing about computers is the fact that it's incomplete. I [weirdly] enjoy building/designing and repairing essentially any non-organic item. I actually started building my first machine (machinery not computer machine) over the summer 3 summers ago.
 
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If I weren't, you know, a very scientific-minded atheist and everything, I could totally see myself as a clergyman or such. I guess you could say that the study of physics and mathematics is my religion, in a sense. Physics is the study of the fabric of the universe, of the nature of reality itself - it's how I look for meaning and context. Those rare occasions when I feel like I actually start to comprehend something are profoundly spiritual. At the same time, there's that constant, nagging awareness that ultimate understanding is forever going to be beyond my grasp (and everyone else's - I don't think such a thing even exists, because answers will always raise new questions), but in typical absurdist fashion, I trundle on anyway, because there's still a kind of joy to be found in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.

Mathematics is the language that lets me express ideas in physics and work with them, but I don't just use it as a tool; it's elegant in its own right. Sometimes math doesn't feel as intimate or moving as physics, because while it's quite good at illuminating reality, it's not inherently tied to it. But it's still full of art and revelation... and because it's more general, I guess it often feels like I'm exploring not just our world, but a broader concept of world of which ours is just a specific case. The most delightful thing!

There's still so many things I don't know about or don't understand, but I feel like I'm picking up pieces of a giant puzzle and that a picture is slowly coming into view. I like that feeling.
 
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