I was born on Sunday, February 1st, 1981 in Waynesboro, Virginia. Waynesboro is a small city at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the central Shenandoah Valley. If you’ve ever heard John Denver’s song Country Roads, you’ll recognize that this is the area which the song references (The Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River are in western Virginia). To get an idea of the situation into which I was born, it would be best to first read the page summarizing my family. I’ll focus this autobiographical sketch mainly on my intellectual development. Thusly, the only “personal” matters that I will mention are those which had a significant impact on my intellectual and professional growth.
When I was born, my father was ill. Neither of my parents had completed high school, so our family had a very low income, based mainly on veterans benefits. However, we did own a fairly large (18.75 acre) plot of land in addition to the land upon which we were living. The large plot was located about a mile outside of the town of Grottoes, VA–less than a mile from the Augusta County-Rockingham County line, Grand Caverns, and the Shenandoah National Park boundary. My dad thought that he was going to die soon, so he set things up so the family would have a nicer place to live. When I was a few months old, we moved to that plot of land, which I would come to know simply as “home”.
In contrast with my next-closest sibling, I developed more quickly than average. I was cruising at 7 months. I began walking without holding onto furniture at 9 months, and I was able to construct simple complete sentences at 10 months. During my first few years, I learned a great deal from watching documentaries and movies on television, playing with puzzles and logic games, taking things apart, and simply observing nature. I didn’t have any direct exposure to highly educated people and I was never coerced into learning new things. I didn’t go to pre-school or anything like that. Whenever I learned something new, it was because I made an effort. When I started kindergarten, I was apparently above average. We were given some sort of standardized aptitude test in Kindergarten. The only thing I remember about it now is that I had to fill in little ovals with a pencil. I scored in the 99th percentile in several categories. I found out about this years later–after finishing college.
Elementary school was mostly boring and I hated going, but I did learn a lot of things that I couldn’t learn at home, so it seemed worthwhile in some ways. My least favorite part of the day was the bus ride to and from school; There were some older kids on the bus who enjoyed picking on me. I also dreaded “reading” classes because I absolutely hated being forced to read “fiction” and I didn’t like being called on to read aloud. Later I discovered that I didn’t like “fiction” because the subject matter of the fiction was too childish for me. I had high marks in first and second grade, with the exception of the brief period after recovering from pneumonia. I won my first academic competition in second grade–the class spelling bee.
During the summers of my childhood, I climbed trees in the wooded area on our property. I explored the woods on the neighbor’s property as well. My neighbor, Paul and I built a “fort” in a tree out of logs and old honeysuckle vines. It was great fun! My mom didn’t want me to hang around with Paul though–he was a few years older than me and he was “weird”. He had been in trouble for stealing things and his parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses. I think she was afraid that he was going to “witness” to me or something. I got in trouble for just talking to him. Paul introduced me to the art of bonsai when I was in 4th grade. He had seen bonsai in The Karate Kid or one of the sequels and he tried learning, but it seemed that he wasn’t very successful. I learned a lot from the book that he sold to me and from simple trial and error.
One day, while I was near the top of a pine tree that Paul and I called the “look-out tree”, a bird landed within arm’s reach and it started calling. I was fascinated! I had never seen a wild bird so closely before. I looked through reference books and I soon figured out that the bird was a mourning dove. That experience led me to the discovery of Audubon field guides. They were packed full of cool information about birds, snakes, insects, wildflowers, trees, weather, the night sky, and much more. I was hooked instantly.
In terms of science education, elementary school was insulting. I learned much more during the summer than the teachers ever taught us in class. I had a chemistry set and a microscope, I read Audubon field guides, and I watched documentaries. I also had access to my neighbor’s machine shop which contained all kinds of cool equipment–including two microscopes which were much more powerful than anything the school had. In 4th grade, a standardized test result placed my science knowledge at the level expected of someone who was finishing 8th grade, which illustrates just how pathetic science education is in the United States. I also began drawing and painting rather well in 4th grade. I was subsequently placed into the “talented and gifted” (TAG) program for art and science.
Middle school (junior high) wasn’t much better than elementary school in terms of the quality of education. My least favorite part of middle school was P.E. class because I hated being forced to play sports. I liked doing the exercises and the physical fitness tests, but when I was expected to play sports, I often faked being sick. When I was essentially forced to play, I refused to put effort into it. I would not lower myself to the level of the people who found amusement with “retarded” sports. I had a low opinion of most of the people who enjoyed team sports. I guess I haven’t changed much in that way. The only team sports that have ever been slightly pleasurable for me are soccer and floor hockey.
During the summer between 6th and 7th grades, I created my first fish pond / water garden using a Rubbermade cattle watering troff. I drew a design, dug the hole, and then my mom and a family friend named Milton Bolton transported the materials (mostly gravel and large stones). Together, we finished constructing the pond. Soon I had aspirations of making a larger, more natural-looking pond. The next summer, I began working on a large garden at the edge of the woods. The plan was to have a garden with a much larger pond, lined with with Firestone pond liner. The first summer of the project was mostly spent clearing brush, pruning trees, and getting rid of honeysuckle. I was able to finish making a little greenhouse / hotbed for propagating plants and sheltering my bonsai during the winter. I also built a potato cannon that summer. I learned a lot from my summer projects.
During 8th grade, Milton died of cancer. He was like a grandfather to me. He knew a lot about landscaping, carpentry, woodworking, masonry, farming, and mechanical devices….and he was also a pretty good cook. I learned many things from him. The same year, Paul decided to kill my dog. He placed her under my mom’s bedroom window. Over the next few years, he vandalized things in my garden, set a fire in the woods (which I was able to extinguish because I caught it early), and shot a pellet gun at our house on multiple occasions. Once, when I was outside, I heard a pellet whiz by my head. He was eventually arrested for putting a “bomb” in the local post office. When he was released, he continued terrorizing the neighborhood and the surrounding area. He set fire to a neighbor’s house. He was arrested again and I believe he’s still in prison for attempted manslaughter and arson. I heard that he burnt a church and something else. He also attempted to blow up a local gas station.
The quality of education improved significantly once I finally reached high school. The teachers were more respectful toward the students and they seemed more knowledgeable in general. Ninth grade was a huge turning point for me; I used the Would Wide Web for the first time. There were only a few computers at the school connected to the Internet and (as far as I know) they were all in the library. My friends and I spent our free time in the library using an Intel 80486 machine running Windows 3.1 and we used the Netscape Navigator web browser to explore the Web. The hardware and the ISDN connection were slow, but the possibilities were amazing. Within a year or so, the entire school was renovated and most of the classrooms had Internet access. In my 9th grade English class, we started each class session with a few minutes of silent reading. One of the first books that I read was A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. That book changed my life. I was very interested in the concepts described in the book and I wanted to find out more…suddenly I came up with the crazy idea of becoming a theoretical astrophysicist. The only other book I remember from that year was a biography of Gandhi.
Between 9th and 10th grades, I continued working on my large garden. I began digging the hole for my fish pond and working out the details of the overall design of the garden. I continued learning about water gardening from the experience of taking care of my existing pond. I also built a pair of stilts that summer. I was able to take a few steps on the stilts on my first try and I was walking pretty well after a day or two of practice.
I had been placed into the less accelerated (i.e. slow) mathematics education track because my pre-algebra teacher in 7th grade was basically incompetent. As a consequence of being on the “slow” track, I had to take algebra 1-part 1 in 8th grade and algebra-1 part 2 in 9th grade. Technically I could have caught up by taking two math classes each year once I reached high school. I didn’t choose that path though, because math classes were painfully boring and artificial. I ended up taking geometry as a 10th grader–one year later than most of my peers. My average in the class was well over 100% because I got everything right and there was extra credit available. In one case, I had to explain something to the teacher because he didn’t understand a pretty basic concept. He made an erroneous assumption in one of the homework assignments and I thought I would just have to mention it to him to make him realize his mistake, but he had to check with another teacher in order to make sure that I was correct. That was disappointing. I was basically explaining to him the concept of the flux of a vector field through a surface, although I didn’t know the terminology at the time. The vector field was associated with raindrops during a thunderstorm and the surface was the roof of a barn.
Personally, I think that students should start learning algebra and geometry in the latter part of elementary school. If this were properly implemented, most students could begin single variable calculus in 9th grade. Those who are interested in continuing with mathematics could then learn vector calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, and maybe some complex analysis or another topic. Unfortunately, most elementary school teachers are clueless regarding how to teach math. Furthermore, there aren’t enough teachers at the high school level who really know the more “advanced” mathematics topics well enough to teach the classes. Okay, that’s enough ranting about math education, back to my summer projects…
I finished designing my garden and digging the hole for the pond, so it was time to install the liner. Everything went smoothly and I soon had plants, koi, and goldfish in the pond. The garden was the culmination of several years of work and learning. It was actually very much like doing research. One of my neighbors saw the pond, then they wanted to have one for their yard, too. I advised them and helped a little bit with the construction process. I eventually installed a second pond and a marshy area in my garden.
In 11th grade, I took my first chemistry class and my first physics class. I did well in chemistry, but it was only marginally interesting compared with physics. I also began taking Spanish classes. I had A’s and A+’s for the remainder of high school and I often had the highest overall grade in each class. Being the top student in my classes didn’t require much effort, which makes sense because I didn’t take any “advanced placement” classes. In physics, my average was 115% at one point because I never had any points deducted and I had correct answers to all of the extra credit problems.
Around the beginning of 12th grade, I started the process of choosing a college major. At first I was unsure which of my passions I should follow–landscape architecture or physics. I decided on physics because it seemed to lead to more possibilities and it was more challenging and prestigious. Later that year, I read The History of Physics by Isaac Asimov, Relativity by Einstein, and some papers about gravitation and Riemannian geometry. I gained a conceptual understanding of certain aspects of general relativity, but I didn’t understand the Riemannian geometry stuff because I lacked the background knowledge. After all, I was only in pre-calculus at the time. I began wondering whether inertia and gravitation were caused by quantum vacuum fluctuations. I considered the possibility that even the concepts of space and time were intrinsically related to the quantum vacuum. I came up with a mental picture of how inertia and gravitation might work and I thought that my idea might even be used to detect gravitational waves using a cleverly designed Casimir force apparatus.
I didn’t apply for any college scholarships even though my mom didn’t have the money to pay for tuition. I knew that my dad’s veterans benefits would pay for my tuition as long as I went to a Virginia school. The benefit package paid for tuition and a few hundred dollars for books each semester, but it didn’t pay for housing, so I applied to the one decent school to which I could realistically commute.
James Madison University (JMU) is located in Harrisonburg, VA. The campus is only a 17 mile drive from my childhood home. Because of my financial situation and the proximity of the school, JMU was the only college to which I bothered applying. I took a scholarship test at the physics department, but I didn’t win the scholarship. Fortunately, I was accepted to the school. Later, I discovered that JMU’s physics department was possibly the best undergraduate physics department in the state.
The university’s atmosphere was friendly and stimulating. The campus felt like a community and the classes were challenging and very rewarding at the beginning. I was focussed solely on physics at first, but I quickly shifted my interest toward other things. Between 1999 and 2001, there was a very exciting battle going on between Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel Corporation. AMD had just released the Athlon processor, which blew away Intel’s Pentium 3. I spent a great deal of my time following the competition as it unfolded. I learned the basic concepts of processor design and then I began learning about overall system design. I took a digital electronics course in the physics department, which allowed me to learn more about some of the finer details. I also started upgrading my computer, fixing computers for other people, and then I began building computers. During the same period, I became obsessed with Adobe Photoshop and I began learning more about digital graphic design and web design. I learned HTML and I started this website. I registered the domain name idius.net, and then I started helping other people design websites. While I was becoming a Photoshop expert and learning about web design and computer hardware, I only spent enough time on physics to learn the material and get a “decent” passing grade. Grades had always seemed artificial to me and I assumed that they weren’t important in reality. I was satisfied as long as I passed with a C or better. I learned most of the concepts, but I didn’t spend much time on homework to prove that I understood the concept and thus I didn’t practice enough to get high scores on tests. I ended up with lots of C’s and B’s, a few A’s, and one D in physics classes.
During my senior year, I started dating Tazzie Howard. She was a geology major who was two years younger than me. Dating her caused me to be more focussed on school. My grades improved as a result. I worked on a simple “research” project with the chair of the physics department. It mainly involved applying the things I had learned about computer hardware and software. His office and lab were on opposite sides of the campus, so I basically set things up so he could monitor his experiments remotely using LabView and the school network. I also took two very important classes that year: Astrophysics and The History of Science. The two classes were taught by my favorite professor, William H. Ingham. Astrophysics combined material from all of the previous physics classes I had taken. It was a very interesting course, and it served as a comprehensive review of physics. I became interested in galactic simulation and the possibility of using simulations to study the nature of the mysterious “dark matter”. Then I wondered if modified versions of gravity could resolve the dark matter problem. Perhaps galaxy simulations could be used to test theories of gravitation. In the the history of science class, I learned more history than what was presented in the Asimov book that I had read four years earlier. I gained more insight into how science progresses and I learned some interesting historical details as well.
I did not apply to graduate school immediately. I wanted a break from school and I wanted to spend time with Tazzie. She had two more years of school remaining; if I went to graduate school, we would be far apart. I began looking for jobs in the Harrisonburg area, but that was futile. There were practically no entry-level jobs that I wasn’t over-qualified for because of my physics degree or under-qualified for because I didn’t have a master’s degree or PhD.
I ended up taking a part-time position at Century 21 TRI Timeshares. Initially the job just involved painting, but then I started fixing things and doing a lot of random tasks. I worked on finishing a basement in one of the office buildings, I installed ceiling tiles (i.e. I hung a ceiling), I fixed leaky pipes in one office building and leaks in the roof of another. I was in charge of upgrading the software on the computers and teaching the sales agents how to use new software. I also did some database “scrubbing”–checking the validity of old entries. During this period I was also continuing my search for full-time employment and I began investing in the stock market. At one point, I was making more money in the stock market than I was from the job.
As the timeshare resale market continued to stagnate and the company lost money in a legal battle with Century 21, many people were laid off and others simply resigned. Eventually the custodial staff was laid off and custodial services were added to my list of duties. I had to show up extra early in the morning to vacuum the offices and clean the bathrooms before most of the sales agents arrived. Then the company closed an office in another city, so I had to rent a U-Haul, help to move all of the furniture and computers from that office, and put the items in storage. Witnessing a company disintegrate was a bit depressing, but fascinating at the same time. The timeshare component of the company eventually imploded and I was laid off. All that survived was a small marketing company.
I received a small inheritance from my grandfather’s estate around the same time I was laid off and I invested a large chunk in AMD about a week before they announced their earnings. I was confident that the earnings report would show that the stock was undervalued and the price would rise subsequently. Once my prediction came true, I sold the stock. I made a few thousand dollars from that. My bank account had grown substantially from the part time job, the inheritance, and the stock trading. I was driving an unreliable 1987 Ford Escort at the time, so I decided to use part of my savings to buy a better car. I bought a used Toyota Avalon XLS for less than what I had earned in the stock market. I wasn’t able to find full-time employment, but I was able to get by on my savings, so it wasn’t a big deal.
While all of this was going on, I was spending a lot of time with Tazzie. I practically lived in her townhouse with her. I shared my passion for physics and astrophysics with her. She became a physics minor and and astronomy minor. I tutored her and a few of her classmates in physics and calculus. I discovered that I was pretty good at explaining things. I enjoyed figuring out alternative ways of explaining things. Tutoring was a great way for me to review for graduate school. To prepare further, I bought some books on E&M, complex analysis, tensor calculus, differential geometry, and Fourier analysis because I knew that I would need to know more about these topics for graduate school.
When Tazzie started her senior research project, she was going to work with the geophysicist in the department, but he died of cancer quite suddenly. She found another professor to serve as her advisor, but he was unfamiliar with physics. His function was essentially to sign paperwork. I worked on the project with her–basically serving as her advisor. The project was a simple computational magnetosphere model in which we balanced the pressure between solar wind and the geomagnetic field on the sunward (day) side of the magnetosphere in an attempt to find the position and shape of the bow shock. It wasn’t a useful project in terms of its output, but it was a valuable learning experience for both of us.
In addition to getting teaching experience, studying physics in more detail, and learning to use the stock market to my advantage, I also became a harder worker during this two year “break” period. I forced myself to carefully work through boring, mundane details of derivations and application problems. This improved the speed with which I could perform mundane tasks. I had previously been too lazy to write every step in solving a problem if the expressions were more than a few lines long. I also had my wisdom teeth removed during this period, which had a huge impact on me. I didn’t get sick nearly as often and I could concentrate for longer periods of time.
Tazzie and I applied to graduate schools during the fall of 2004. At this point, we had been dating for over two years and we had known one another for three years, so I thought we would be able to handle a little distance. Tazzie accepted an offer from The Pennsylvania State University (PSU) and I accepted my only offer, which was from George Mason University (GMU). The drive from GMU to PSU was reasonable, which meant that we could see one another from time to time. Also, GMU was just a few miles from Tazzie’s home, so whenever she was home, we’d automatically be close. It seemed like a decent plan to me.
George Mason University is located in northern Virginia, near Washington DC. Their graduate programs are designed so that government employees and other local professionals can work during the day and pursue graduate degrees in the evening. The university is located in the wealthiest county in the United States–Fairfax County, VA. I wanted to have a reasonable income while I worked on my master’s degree, so being a teaching assistant was not an option. I applied for jobs as a high school teacher. I wanted to be either a math teacher or a physics teacher, but I soon learned that I was considered “unqualified” to teach math because I had not taken an abstract algebra course, so I focussed on finding a physics teaching position. About two weeks before the first day of school, I was hired at Oakton High School in Vienna, VA. Oakton was conveniently just a few minute drive from GMU. Starting pay was $40K, which was much better than what I would be paid as a TA at GMU.
Virginia law requires unlicensed teachers to show that they are working toward licensure. They must complete the licensure program within three years of being hired. My plan was to work toward licensure and complete my master’s degree in physics in three years rather than the usual two. Since I would be working a demanding full-time job and taking courses in the School of Education and Human Development in addition to my physics courses, three years seemed like a more reasonable target than two years. I planned to stop teaching and begin a PhD program at another university after completing the MS. However nothing seems to ever go exactly as planned, which is fortunate in this case.
In August of 2005, I started teaching high school and taking graduate physics classes. I had to overcome a few artificial obstacles because I was a new teacher and because I was unlicensed. One weekend, as I was finishing up the process of jumping through hoops, I drove up to PSU to visit Tazzie. It had been two weeks since I saw her last. During that visit, Tazzie ended our relationship. She had met someone in her department at PSU. The next few months were difficult. I was living in a ghetto apartment in Fairfax because it was the only one I could rent in the area before I had a job offer. I had to be at work by 7:00 AM each morning, teach, go to meetings, and then attend my graduate classes at night. I had to find time to do my own homework, create instructional materials and lesson plans for the classes that I was teaching, and grade my students’ quizzes, tests, labs, and homework. Finding time to sleep was quite difficult. To complicate matters, I wasn’t just teaching physics. In order to make my position full-time during my first year, I had to teach a remediation class called “Developing Literacies” and a special chemistry class. I had to do all of this without the emotional support of the person who had been my best friend.
Somehow I managed to make it through that first year without flunking out of grad school. I actually did quite well in computational physics during the spring semester. It could even be said that I excelled. During the summer of 2006, I began studying tensor calculus and differential geometry in detail. I spent a few hours each day working on it. By the end of the summer, I was a different person in terms of my understanding of mathematics. My level of mathematical literacy and my ability to mentally manipulate expressions skyrocketed. I also read several things written by Richard Feynman and Roger Penrose. During the same period, I discovered the wonders of fasting and I started consuming fish oil and supplements like alpha GPC (a source of choline) and acetyl l-carnitine. I was suddenly able to concentrate more intensely and think more clearly than ever before.
Noah Early, one of my friends since elementary school, bought a house in Arlington, VA during the summer of 2006. I moved out of my Fairfax apartment and into his finished basement. Noah’s house was a huge improvement over the ghetto apartment that I had been living in. Arlington was a much nicer area than the City of Fairfax as well. The basement was quiet and dark at night–perfect for sleeping. The rent was slightly cheaper than my old apartment and I had some company, so moving to Noah’s house was very beneficial. At work, I was given a new, larger classroom and I was teaching only physics instead of three completely separate classes. To top it off, I was now being paid about $46k per year rather than $40k because it was my second year on the job and I had enough graduate credits to move to a higher pay bracket. My PayPal money market account interest rate was also high and my stocks were gaining in value. Overall this seemed like it would be like a much better year than 2005, and it was.
During my second year at GMU, I took classical electrodynamics 1 & 2, a stellar atmospheres class, and an introduction to general relativity & cosmology. My tensor calculus and differential geometry knowledge paid off during the electrodynamics and the relativity courses. In the fall, one of my professors suggested that I should stop teaching high school and get a research assistantship the following year. I had already learned everything I wanted to learn about teaching in the public high schools, so I followed his advice. I spoke with Robert Weigel (Bob) in the space weather research group about becoming a research assistant. During my Christmas break, I began reading a book that Bob recommended. This was my first in-depth introduction to magnetospheric substorms and convection. It marked the beginning of my formal research career.
My research assistantship technically began in May, but I didn’t finish teaching until June, so I was briefly being paid for two full-time jobs. I spent most of the summer reading An Introduction to Space Physics, some plasma physics books, and journal articles. I also wrote a few simple codes in Matlab.
While I was making the transition into research, I was also getting to know Angela Lee, one of Noah’s co-workers. Noah introduced us and we quickly became interested in one another. Noah offered to rent one of the upstairs bedrooms to her and she accepted. Angela and I began dating. Things went well until Noah made us aware that he wanted Angela for himself. At that point, the living situation became very awkward and stressful because he was our landlord and they were co-workers. It was a mess! I had already begun the process of applying to PhD programs and Angela was making plans to move to Los Angeles. She encouraged me to apply to CA schools so we could continue to be close.
In the mean time, at school I had become a full-time student and part-time research assistant. My main courses during the fall semester were quantum mechanics and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Graduate level quantum mechanics was surprisingly easy after completing all of the other core physics courses. CFD was the most challenging course I had ever taken–and one of the most rewarding. It played an essential role in my subsequent research project. In November of 2007, I stopped using Microsoft Windows and switched all of my computers to Ubuntu 7.10. I had Suse Linux installed in a partition on my computers for years and I had tried earlier versions of Ubuntu, but the lack of hardware support forced me to use Windows until Ubuntu 7.10 was released. Once I began using Linux full-time, I quickly learned the Unix shell commands, shell scripting, the finer details of Linux, and the many incredibly powerful features and free applications that are available with the GNU/Linux platform. At Bob’s request, I made my office workstation into a web server. I installed a wiki and I learned 
so I could document my research and easily share it with him.
Sir Roger Penrose gave a lecture at GMU in the fall. The lecture was part of the Aharonov Distinguished Lecture Series, named after Yakir Aharonov, a rather famous physicist at GMU. This was the first time I had met one of my physics “heroes”, so it was a nice experience. I recorded a video of the lecture and posted it on YouTube, here. Unfortunately the audio is low because of the sound system in the room and the camera is shaky because I didn’t have a tripod with me.
During the spring semester, I took the second half of quantum mechanics. As a project for the class, I had to learn the essentials of Feynman’s path integral formulation and present a lecture on it. This was a highly valuable exercise. The class ended with a brief introduction to second quantization. I spent the bulk of my time working on my research. I attended CFD lectures, but I didn’t enroll in the second semester of the class because I needed to focus on my research project.
I applied to PhD programs in gravitation and astrophysics at ten schools in six states. Three of the schools were in CA. Angela moved to Los Angeles in February. I was accepted to the University of Utah and the University of California, Riverside (UCR). I felt that the University of California was more prestigious and would provide me with more resources. Riverside is also warmer than Salt Lake City, and it’s much closer to LA, so I accepted the offer from UCR. I finished my master’s degree in May and moved back home to conserve money and recover from a horrible illness triggered by an allergic reaction to mold and soot which occurred while I was packing to leave Noah’s house.
By the time I flew to CA to rent an apartment, Angela had effectively ended the relationship.
I flew to CA and signed a rental agreement for an apartment within walking distance of the physics department. In late August, I packed most of my belongings into an ABF truck and had them shipped to CA. Then I drove my car across the US. Driving across the continent is an awesome experience. I highly recommend it! A few weeks later, my sister flew to CA to help me set up my apartment. At the time, she had a significant income, so she bought some things for me. Unfortunately, the same week she was at my apartment, her employer, AIG, began making national headlines due to their significant financial problems. The nation finally realized that much of the existing economy was really a sham. The economic downturn that began in 2007 suddenly turned into a nose-dive.
The first three quarters of classes at UCR were ridiculous. The professors attempted to pack four semesters worth of material into one academic year. The material wasn’t covered in much depth because there was so little time to focus on each topic. Fortunately, I already had a strong background in most of the material being covered, so I managed to get nearly straight A’s in the physics classes. I only had one A-. I also did rather well in the astronomy classes.
In late March of 2009, I met Tana Davidson online and then we met in person and went on a hike in early April. I became very excited about her and did some stupid things which scared her away. We continued talking online and I spent the next few months trying to redeem myself and trying to impress her.
The comprehensive examination was scheduled to take place two weeks after the end of the spring quarter. I spent the first week after the end of the quarter just relaxing. I began working on a balcony garden. I bought some Irish moss and I made a bonsai from a tree that I bought at the local nursery. I also began overhauling Idius Land! around the same time. I spent most of the second week practicing for the comprehensive exam and trying to adjust my sleep schedule because the exam was early in the morning. I had grown accustomed to waking up around noon. I was reasonably successful in preparing for the exam, but I became sick due to lack of sleep while changing my sleep schedule. I felt miserable during the exam days due to lack of sleep and my sinusitis. After the exam, I realized a lot of stupid errors that I made. I was sure that I couldn’t have possibly passed at the PhD level. A few days later I found out that I had indeed passed! I was one of only two domestic students who passed the exam. I immediately began preparing to do research in galactic dynamics. I read the standard book on the subject, then I read many journal articles and annual reviews. I wrote some small programs in C++ and I read a C++ book so I would be aware of the full capabilities of the language. I rapidly learned most of the essential pieces needed in order to begin research.
I progressed very quickly in terms of my physical fitness as well. In the course of hiking with Tana, I realized that I was in horrible physical condition. I began an exercise routine after I recovered from the sinusitis. I exercised every other day. Things were going well in general. It even seemed like I might be making some progress with Tana. Then, on September 9th, I read a horrible message posted on Tana’s Facebook wall. Tana had committed suicide. I was unable to eat or even leave my apartment at first. The next few weeks were mainly spent dealing with her death. Many of the people close to me have died, but this was different on many levels.
In early October, I drove to Mt. Hamilton to attend an astronomy workshop at the Lick Observatory. The trip helped me deal with Tana’s death. I’ve been slowly getting back into my research. I recently finished writing part of an NSF proposal and now I’m becoming more motivated about learning and accomplishing something again. My level of physical fitness continues to improve.
That brings us to the present and future. I’m still curious about quantum gravitation and the possibility of using galaxy simulations to test theories. However, my PhD research will likely be a bit less ambitious…It will mainly involve developing more of the skills needed in order to pursue my interests. My research page is here, my personal web log (blog) posts are here, and some of my goals for the future are listed here.