A Walker in the Suburbs

The rain had stopped, the library books were due, so yesterday I returned them. There are several ways to reach Georgetown from Metro, but I took the Key Bridge route. It’s the most impressive way to walk to campus, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Georgetown sits on a bluff above the Potomac, which is why it’s called The Hilltop. When you approach it from the bridge, Healy Hall looms ahead like a castle, like the National Historic Landmark that it is.

Once in the District you’ll need to walk up, either by trudging an impossibly steep street (which was under construction) or by taking the Exorcist Stairs. I chose the latter, and made quick work of it. They are creepy even at 10:30 a.m.

But as soon as I reached the top, I was transported. The campus is leafy and green. It’s finals week, and preparations are already underway for graduation. Students clustered in study rooms in the library and hung out on Healy Lawn. The morning was picture-perfect. I don’t get to campus very often. Maybe I should change that.

The professor opened his lecture on quantum mechanics with the statement that people who said they understood it were not telling the truth, and he ended his lecture by saying, “I hope you’re now as confused about quantum theory as I am.”

My professor was repeating this story at the end of his lecture on quantum theory, which was, fittingly, the last class of the semester. Fittingly because how can you top quantum theory, especially when you (read I) can’t even define quantum theory.

Here are a few lines from my notes: “Because the measured electron is radically different from the unmeasured electron, it appears that we cannot describe this particle (or any other) without referring to the act of observation.”

Quantum mechanics both befuddles and ignores the Newtonian world view. Quantum theory “challenges our intuitions by having conscious observation actually create the physical reality.” It’s the stuff of science fiction. Only it’s not fiction. It’s the “most stunningly successful of all the theories in science; not a single one of its predictions has ever been wrong.”

From quantum has flowed the Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr, who posits that there is no deep reality; that the world we see around us is real but floats on a world that is not as real. From quantum has flowed the Copenhagen interpretation number two, that reality is created by observation and there is no reality without observation.

From quantum has flowed the many worlds theory, the idea that innumerable parallel universes as real as our own exist. The fact that I’m writing a post on quantum mechanics is all the proof I need of the many worlds theory.

Last night I took the last multiple choice test of the semester … and I hope the last multiple-choice test I’ll ever take. It felt more difficult than the last one but not as crazy-making as the first.

To prepare for these examinations I study about 100 printed pages of notes. I read and re-read. I highlight in red pen and yellow marker. I note the main points of each lecture. I try to figure out what questions might be asked.

Most of all, I ask myself why I’m doing this. Worse yet, why I’m paying money to do this. These are moot questions now, I guess. My regular class work ends this semester. Next stop: thesis research and writing. It won’t be easy … but it won’t involve multiple-choice tests.

For the last week or so I’ve been becoming more familiar with PowerPoint than I ever wanted to be. After much angst and effort, I managed to pull together a handful of slides and share them with class last night, no small feat for this technophobe.

I will have to do it again several times this semester, but not for as long and I hope with a slightly higher confidence level. And then there’s something else I’d like to add: a sense of fun. 

The classes I’m taking this fall are not required. No one is forcing me back to school. I’m not working toward a career goal. This is to keep the old gray matter churning. Instead, it’s the stomach that’s been doing loop-the-loops. 

Maybe next time it will be easier. I’m counting on it.  

(Photo of an old bomb I used to illustrate one of my slides last night. … It’s a long story.)

The big yellow buses are rolling, and even for me, school has begun. In fact, I’ve just finished hours of homework for a graduate class, once again ignoring my daughters’ recommendation — “Mom, you don’t have to do all the reading.”

I’ll say what I always do: But I want to do all the reading. Or in this case, the reading and the listening/watching, since this first assignment included a lengthy podcast. I’ve taken pages of notes on how emotions are made, and though much of it is over my head, some of it has permeated the old gray matter. 

I’ve learned that we have more control over our emotions than we think we do, that we can take an unpleasant feeling and work with it. 

This is just the first set of readings, of course. I imagine it will get more complicated. But when I start to feel overwhelmed, I’ll think back to these first readings, and they will help.