Works in Progress

When I first started college, I believed I was going to major in mathematics. Or if not math, then physics. Cue the laugh track.

After all, I’d been a science nerd in high school. Not a techy — I don’t think we had those in the 60s — but an unabashedly gee-whiz aficionado of huge telescopes, laser beams, super-colliders, and everything that was in those days morphing from sci-fi into reality.

My father was a hard-science man, a chemist in the research labs of what we now call Exxon, designing molecules and telling Mother Nature how to build them. He taught me how to use a slide rule and convinced me there were numbers at the heart of everything. I still believe that.

Majoring in math seemed obvious, the path of least resistance. Math had been all fun and games up to that point — if I stayed awake in class, I’d ace the tests. Why should it be different at Rice?

Why indeed, other than the facts that (a)Rice was among the premier science-engineering universities in the US, (b)I’d never been exposed to calculus, and (c)I’d never needed to learn how to study?

At some point in the next 8 years — the time it took me to complete my baccalaureate — I did learn how to study, though not before I’d changed my major 3 times, dropped out twice, hitch hiked some 40 thousand miles around the country, and realized my calling was not like my father’s.

I had not lost my love for hard (objective) science, but rather gained a new obsession. I was going to study…