"Be Brave, Be Curious, Be Determined, Overcome The Odds. It Can Be Done” ―Stephen Hawking, Brief

the way my academic arrogance manifests in me as harshly critiquing others' work but then lashes out when somebody else does the same to me

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor

Alexis Carrel

for days of hauling books

the physics students

as requested by the wonderful @starferns

the chalkboard at the front of the lecture hall, covered in equations and graphs

visualizing a problem in your mind, step by step

cold water with ice cubes and a slice of lemon

diagrams drawn hastily on the corner of your paper, scribbled lines and half formed thoughts

replicating famous experiments and demonstrations

watching youtube videos late at night, picking apart complex theories

having an instinct for force diagrams and direction of motion

rushed, messy handwriting

finding beauty in motion and calculation and precision

seeing the universe as unimaginably small and unimaginably large at the same time

a well-worn grey sweater, frayed a little at the sleeves

equations scribbled on your arm until you know them by heart

studying newton and meitner and plank, all those who went before

talking with your hands, forming the shapes of arcs and trajectories as you work through a problem

long hallways and cold, sunny days

late night study groups

staring up at the sky, knowing exactly why and how the planets move as they do

trying einstein’s thought experiments

an old grandfather clock, pendulum measuring the passage of time

pages filled with calculations and precise strings of digits

"i can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people."

isaac newton

The Lament for Icarus by Herbert James Draper

"i can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people."

isaac newton

“““You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.””

—

— Ocean Vuong, from “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”

― Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

[text ID: I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.]