Awesomely Normal

My parents just returned from a 10-day vacation to the West coast. Having forced them to take a day trip to the Grand Canyon, I was especially interested in their experience at my favorite spot. Needless to say, they loved it. However, what intrigued them most was not the marvel of nature, but that of man.

It was the skywalk at the West rim that made the most impact on them. The beauty and the elegance of this amazing experience were secondary. The core of my father's conversation was the intriguing engineering and construction of this wonder. He began with an instant glow in his eyes. The 5 hours of flight exhaustion instantly wore off. He included every intricate detail in his eloquent story and his amazement with each added fact was apparent. He compared it to the construction of the skywalk at the Sears tower (it's not Willis tower!) and admitted that the construction of the one at the Grand Canyon was both more difficult and superior.

I couldn't help but recognize the grandeur of engineers. An experience becomes doubly enjoyable when we indulge in the effort and the challenges that were involved with its being. But even so, I couldn't help but wonder why my dad found this skywalk special. He continued his story with examples of similar constructions. What made this particular one awesome for him was the fact that it was 70 feet from the edge and over 4000 feet above ground. The details associated with the creation of a frame structure and scaffolding would have demanded intense engineering and immense creativity.

However, all his examples seemed awesome to me. I thought the minar he built for a mosque in Dubai was awesome. As is my belief about the skywalk at the Sears tower. Yet he so quickly reduced those brilliant structures to the manifest of normalcy. Perhaps this is the difference between education and experience.

I find it awesome to listen to lectures about diffusion imaging. I find it awesome to learn about sensory integration. I find it awesome to discover the workings of electrical and magnetic stimulation. I find it awesome to link electromagnetic theories to the properties of the brain. But maybe, I find these awesome because my naive and immature mind is unable to discern between awesome and normal.

Often, I go into my adviser's office with a question I have been struggling with for weeks. I finally have an answer. It's brilliant. I just uncovered a milestone. So I walk in there, cheery, with big bright eyes and describe my finding. He replies with a solution far more efficient and sophisticated than the one I proposed. It takes him ten minutes to nullify what has taken me weeks. Alas, I implement it and it works like magic. Hence, my awesome has been reduced to normal.

Perhaps the journey of PhD is to attain that balance of education and experience to finally differentiate between that which is normal and that which is awesome. It is the awesome that gets published and cited and followed up. So, I may still be floating in this world of intrigue and curiosity. But it is those qualities that make for a true student and an honest researcher. If we knew all the answers and how to get them, why would we research?

I watched Proof this morning. It is a story about a mad mathematician and his devoted daughter (played by Gwyneth Paltrow). While taking care of her mentally ill father, his college drop-out daughter assists with his work in mathematics. During this period, she writes a 40-page proof that may be groundbreaking for the field. However, she hides this notebook until her father passes away. The irony is that she must now prove that she wrote the proof and not her genius father. Her only evidence is the use of modern methods that makes her proof more "hip" instead of "classic". The education of those techniques were the tools at her disposal when she didn't have experience.

The modern methods and contemporary science are our biggest weapons in advancing from normal to awesome. Sure experience is great, Dad, but it is modern education that makes it seemingly obvious that when you forget to carry your phone charger along, you don't have to freeze in the car to charge your phone. You can just unplug the USB cable and hook it up to your laptop in the warmth and comfort of your home. And while this bit may seem awesome to you, it's really just normal.

Thanks for the lesson! :)