I often question if I am ever going to use the knowledge I learned from my classes in real life. What does partial derivatives, Heaviside-Lorentz functions, or homogenous matrices have to do with anything in life after college? This question pops up in my mind every once in a while but I have been choosing to ignore it. I’ve always been strictly separating nature and science, for some reason I believed that knowing the science behind things ruins the nature of it. Yesterday afternoon over my visit to my reflection spot, I had a few new thoughts about science in real life.
It was a sunny spring afternoon, everything was warm and lazy. I found a grassy area to sit near my reflection spot; I did not notice anything special. I looked up into the blue sky for a while and it made me very happy. Beneath the sky, a few loblolly branches caught my attention. I looked back and found all these trees, “that’s a loblolly”, “that’s a shortleaf pine”, “that’s dogwood… wait is it?” I said to myself. I walked up to the trees unconsciously so I could take a closer look at the leafs and tried to see if I could identify them. After I successfully named all the trees in the area, including the ones that were not on the exam, I felt very accomplished. I went and sat down again, I realized that a few weeks ago I was complaining about having to remember these tree names. I thought that as long as we know trees are good for the environment and looks good around neighborhoods, there’s absolutely no need to know their names. I was wrong. The fact that I was able to identify the trees, know what habitat they live in, how and why they are shaped the way they are gives me so much information about the surrounding environment. As I was going into deeper thought about these trees, I took another look around; everything became so special and interesting: the pollen floating on water has to do with the surface density of the water which I learned about in Math class; there are atoms vibrating in the air that keeps the world running (statistical mechanics!); there are trillions of photons from the sunlight passing through our bodies every millisecond, and then human’s complex nerve system transfer signals to human brains that the weather is warm, I learned this in my physics class. I’ve been telling myself to separate science with nature, but now I feel like I’ve been missing out a whole lot. The fact that I understood how all these nature parts have come together made nature more magical to me. Science doesn’t destroy nature’s beauty; it actually enhances the beauty of nature and makes me appreciate the beauty of nature more. After this realization, I took a walk around my reflection spot and had many more fascinating discoveries. However, I also found many things that I cannot explain.
There is a time in every person’s childhood when they start asking all kinds of question about the things around them, but then there is also a time when most people realize the world is too big and too complicated for them to understand; so they just kick back and accept whatever is around them. I unfortunately fall into the “kick back and accept” category and blinded myself with ignorance. After my visit to the reflection spot, I decided to start taking baby steps to appreciate nature more; my very first step is to ask more questions. I learned that nature is closely related to science and science is the only enhancer for the appreciation of nature.
