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This morning, in Modern Physics (don't you dare click away. If I have to suffer through this material for 6 hours a week then you can damn well pay attention to one blog post. Besides, I will reward your patience with pictures of cute animals if you keep reading) we talked about more general applications of Schroedinger's Time-Independent equation, as well as specific, vector-like properties of energy components in three dimensions.

I was on the edge of my seat the entire lecture. Not because I was particularly excited about the material, or drank too much coffee, but because I was expecting my physics professor to pull a rabbit out of his butt. As my lab partner said during the lecture, "Quantum Physics is pretty much, well, magic."

But not the good kind of magic. Not the happy, feel good magic of most disney movies, but the gut-churning, terror-inducing, fear raging kind in the Prestige that results in dead identical twins and chopped off fingers.

It's sort of like I'm Harry Potter, a young wizard who really doesn't understand what the hell is going on. Physics is my magic. Sometimes it produces fantastic results, like the first time I aced a test in college, and sometimes it explodes in my face. I've never been more proud and/or frustrated than while I work on physics problems. There's something so satisfying to a problem, to understanding exactly how and why every portion of it operates, even if it's just a few scratches of ink on paper. It's what keeps me going, even when I want to rip up paper, flip off my professor and storm forever out of the room.

Now that I'm going into teaching, it looks like I'm going to be sticking with it. Who knew? Definitely not me. I'm starting to feel like one of the particles I'm attempting to study, spiraling out of control while people around me try and fail to predict where I'll end up next. It's kind of an awesome feeling.

...s promised, cute animals.
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