By day, I'm a software developer. I build logical systems, solve concrete problems, and ship features. My world is one of definite states, of true and false, of functions that take an input and produce a predictable output. But when I close my laptop, my mind drifts to a world that is anything but predictable.
It drifts to the world of physics.
For as long as I can remember, I've been captivated by the big questions. What is this world around us? What am I, really, when you get down to it? The deeper I looked, the more I realized that the answers weren't in philosophy alone, but in the fundamental laws that govern reality itself.
And so, I decided to become a self-taught student of the universe.
My curriculum is guided by pure curiosity. It started with the basics: the elegant dance of particles, the strange duality of light behaving as both a wave and a particle. I devoured videos and articles about the photon, that tiny packet of energy that travels across the cosmos, carrying with it the story of distant stars.
Then, I fell down the rabbit hole of quantum mechanics. The idea of Schrödinger's cat, both alive and dead until observed, wasn't just a thought experiment to me; it was a profound statement about the nature of reality itself. It challenges the very foundation of the logical world I work in every day. How can something exist in multiple states at once? The concepts of superposition and entanglement feel less like science and more like magic, yet they are the bedrock of the universe.
My fascination doesn't stop at the infinitesimally small. It extends to the infinitely large. I find myself lost in thoughts of cosmology, of the Big Bang, of the delicate cosmic web that connects everything. Black holes, with their terrifying and beautiful gravitational pull, are not just objects of scientific curiosity but of existential awe. They are points of infinite density where the laws of physics as we know them simply break down.
And then there's the silence.
The Fermi Paradox haunts me. In a universe so vast, with billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars, why haven't we heard from anyone else? Are we truly alone, or is there a Great Filter that stops civilizations from reaching a certain point? It's a humbling and slightly terrifying question that puts our own existence into perspective.
Being a self-taught learner in this field is a journey of constant wonder. I don't have professors or exams. My only guides are the brilliant minds who have shared their knowledge with the world, and my only motivation is a deep, insatiable need to understand. From the particles that make up my own hand to the vast, silent emptiness of space, physics provides a lens through which to see the world in all its terrifying, beautiful, and mysterious glory. And for me, that is a journey worth taking.