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Searching for Beauty

As a teenager, I have gushed about many things. The overwhelming cuteness of a puppy or a kitten, the sight of my best friends, a good looking actor, a beautiful story…you get the point. When your body is riddled with hormones, you can be pretty emotional about a lot of stuff. But one thing I didn’t expect to be emotional about was my Physics textbook.

I chose science in 10th grade because I thought it was beautiful. In the whirlwind of preparing for competitive exams and the suddenly overwhelming workload, I lost sight of that beauty. Physics was reduced to a a bunch of theories, laws and equations and most importantly, problems. While trying desperately to find the values of E and B, I had forgotten what they stood for. And I don’t mean just ‘electric field’  and ‘magnetic field’ . 

As I read the Physics textbook in the week before my board exam, I marvelled at how smoothly it  connected one idea to another- charges to currents to magnetic fields to electromagnetic waves;to light to wave-particle duality to subatomic particles and finally, to  their applications in the form of semiconducting and communication devices. (For those of you who don’t know- that last sentence is a summary of twelfth grade physics.)

I was reminded of the stories behind these concepts, and the centuries of work and inspiration, and the combined effort of not one person, or even one country- but of an entire species, to find the true nature of the universe.

When you put names,faces, dates and ideas- both failed and successful, behind the formulae, you realise the true meaning of the inheritance we have received. In my case, I saw beauty once more.

There was a time last year when when I was sick of it all- the problems,the tests, the ranks and the never ending rat-race. I wanted something that inspired me. I realise now that I just had to look at what I was seeing.




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Comments

  1. Anonymous15 March 2015 at 00:31

    Haha, I can relate to you
    :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous13 May 2023 at 17:47

    Very relatable!
    As the saying goes, "Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder".

    ReplyDelete

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