I'm in tears after a conversation with a woman on the bus.

[caraher]

59. Just following interests...

My standard joke reason is that the course schedule booklet was alphabetical and since philosophy was right before physics I didn't have to flip through that many pages

One downside of engineering school was just about every class had a weekly problem set, 2 midterms and a final - at some point I realized I rarely read anything besides textbooks. That had to change. Philosophy was an area where there was still a lot of rigor but where you could explore fascinating questions (I took a lot of epistemology and philosophy of science courses - my school had one of the leading philosophers of physics and I took a lot of his classes, so there's less disconnect than you might think!).

At the same time, I did want to know more physics than you need to be an engineer. Back then I thought I wanted to do high energy physics but didn't like the "big science" environment necessary for that (huge collaborations, being just one small piece of the puzzle). By the time I got around to grad school I focused on "tabletop" physics and focused on atomic and molecular physics with an emphasis on probes of quantum theory.

Now I teach physics at a liberal arts college, but my background lets me do more than just that. I've been involved with our ethics institute, gave a talk in the philosophy department on quantum mechanics, helped found an environmental studies honors program, and am currently chair of a curriculum committee working on instituting a multicultural education requirement.

I think the combination of physics and philosophy makes sense on the level of both fields pushing for improved understanding of very fundamental things. Political science, to me, is a hard area, because people are much more a moving target than electrons (which have consistent properties from day to day). I do find I'm drawing more and more on metaphors from physics as I think about politics. One example: I read a piece with a title something like "There is no such thing as public opinion," which made the point that the act of asking a poll question itself generates something that didn't necessarily even exist in the mind of the person polled before the query. This immediately called to mind the interplay in quantum theory between the state of a system and measurement. You don't need quantum mechanics to understand "push polls" but it does offer some fascinating possibilities when you really push the metaphor!