A girl is standing in front of the teacher, a girl rather small for her age. The round face is quite childlike, while the slight body already betrays the early maturity of this southern race. The girl is clad in a peasant smock. She wears wooden shoes. But everyone, not the children only, wear them here, except those very few who belong to the so-called better circles. The brown eyes of the girl a...
One of the first questions people ask me, upon learning I am a physics major, is what exactly I study. In an abstract sense, I study the universe—its fundamental particles, forces, and the mathematics used to describe their interactions. Since this is usually still too broad, I describe my particular field of research: nuclear astrophysics. My advisor and I write and run computer code to simulate ...
I remember that when I was applying to Notre Dame, one of the questions I was asked on my application was this: “Why should we care about the rings of Saturn?” That question really intrigued me, and I believe I wrote something along these lines: If there were no universe surrounding this planet Earth, then human beings would have very little reason to think about their existence and be drawn to co...
