Personal Rage

(Post originally titled:"Exciting times", then immediately retitled before publishing. This is more fitting for this post.)

So I just got my As Physics Challenge result back- a silver which I'm pretty happy with. Not super happy with, mind you, because I got gold on every past paper. But I knew I hadn't done my best, and even anonymously online I don't like bragging so we'll leave it at that. I came third in my year, got a silver medal on a prestigious competition that I wanted to get gold in, and I'm overrall pretty happy with that result. Anyway, the pain, the blinding, blinding pain.

So, while it is not the healthy response to only placing in the top 2 percentiles or whatever this means (I hvae no idea, that's a made up number)- my response is this: I must learn more mathematics. Paradoxically, harder maths makes questions easier. It is for instance quite difficult to come up with imaginiative geometric solutions to questions, but calculus normally solves things in a trice. One of the lessons to take from this is that you cannot be too stupid, you can only be in want of more powerful techniques. Newton invented calculus, sure, but if he had access to today's maths (tensor calculus, calculus of variations) he'd have been so smart they'd have had to lock him up probably. That's the goal- if you get stuck, learn whatever you need to know to get around it. Sometimes the maths you need won't have been invented yet, like for Newton, and in those cases you'll have to invent it. But I need to learn the most powerful maths I can.

Just by the by, in case you haven't noticed from this post, I'm severely paranoid about not being smart enough to do physics properly. I aspire to be a physicist, but I don't yet know if I will be one. Theoretical physicists typically have IQs in the top 0.3% of the population, and there are less than 20 theoretical physics PhDs handed out a year in the UK. I have one hell of a steep wall facing me, and I think I'm justified in occasionally freaking out about whether I can actually climb it.

On a happier note, the UKSDC (UK Space Design Competition) finals are this weekend, so I get to spend all weekend at Imperial College London messing/working with other fantastic physics students from around the country to design some sort of space settlement. Hopefully it will be awesome, I'm going to go prepare!

Not getting gold is not a defeat, it's a signal to push onwards. The fact that it hurts is due to the fact that I wanted a gold, and that wasn't unrealistic. I have one more chance next year, and the only thing to do is to keep aspiring to be the best physicist I can be. Thanks for listening to this rant.