Old Physics

I found this outside my work this morning.

I looked inside. It was full of heliocentric universes and ether.

A PhD

Doing a Ph.D. is an incredibly funny thing. Obviously, going through the process is something that virtually every scientist of note since the early 20th century (I'd love to hear about some notable exceptions) has done, but noone has ever adequately explain to me what the key lesson of it is meant to be. It's like a reading an almost insurmountably long, complex and meandering novel: at times long-winded and technical, at others visceral and romantic, but with no common theme to tie it all together, except that, for some reason, it's all been collected underneath one title*. Furthermore, no matter how hard you try, you just can't skip to the end and see what the ultimate resolution of the tale will be. I don't just mean the outcome of the story, I mean the author's intention: what the fuck am I supposed to take away from this; what is being communicated to me? What is the take home message?

You can read the end of other, similar, books by other authors, but none will be quite like yours and, no matter how intently you try to subvert the fog ahead and sense the author's meaning, you are left with only the inescapable feeling that maybe, just maybe, all this thinking and subversion you're attempting is the one and only point of all this reading you've been doing. If you're lucky, you'll read some passages that really resonate with you (and very rarely one that better equips you as a reader) but ultimately, when it's finished, all that will have changed is that you started reading, struggled and then just kept on going; all the while, growing closer to the conclusion that maybe experience alone is capable of changing you, and has.

[*If this sounds a lot like 'Moby Dick', well... ...Yeah.].