What a Worm

For those of you who might be interested, here is another video we took during our lab, this one of a drop of milk falling on to the same piece of stretched rubber balloon. It’s slow to watch but rather pretty.

It’s my second-to-last semester here at MIT—that is, if everything goes according to plan—, and I’m taking a class called Strobe Project Laboratory. So far, it’s been hard work but very fun. The objective of the class is not only to take some nifty photos but also to engage in the difficult planning and setup often involved to get such photos. Some people might think it strange that a class involving photography is in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, but it really has its roots in the work of Harold Eugene Edgerton, the late professor of EECS at MIT whose popular fame is often spread through his revolutionary image “Making Applesauce at MIT.”

My lab group, quasi-honestly dubbed “Team Unprepared,” recently got to play with a high-speed video camera, capable of taking up to about 150,000 frames per second at its lowest resolution. During our lab session, we decided to whip up some oobleck, a very easy-to-make non-newtonian fluid, and observe how it would react to being snapped off of some rubber stretched over a circular frame. The following video was only taken at maybe 4000 FPS, but it still shows with plenty of detail some of the nifty effects of sudden force on a non-newtonian liquid. Whereas it is clearly pooling as a liquid at the very beginning of the video, it displays properties of a solid just as it is let fly off of the rubber.

Taking this class makes me wish I could have known Edgerton himself. He was apparently beloved by his students and colleagues and is quoted as having said “The trick to education is to teach people in such a way that they don’t realize they’re learning until it’s too late.” I do, however, consider myself lucky that his legacy seems alive and well at MIT and that the Strobe Project Laboratory upholds his teaching philosophy. I imagine that if I had been told before the semester started that I needed to take a class that involved learning how to use an oscilloscope, or how to calculate frequencies using subharmonics, or how to measure the intensity of a strobe in Beam-Candlepower Seconds, my reaction would have been “Ew—sounds like work to me.” And while the lab does involve calculations and measurements, their purpose is so immediately clear that they no longer seem like the pointless labour that is far too common in many classes, and rather become a means to an often exciting end result.

I think I know myself well enough at this point in my life to know that I will not be a scientist someday, at the very least not in the formal sense. My love for visual art and music has extended since early childhood such that I have nearly always been aware of my greater tendency to create rather than to discover. If anything, I think I’d be an engineer before I’d be a scientist, which I suppose explains why I decided to go to MIT in the first place. However, it disappoints me that it took me until my senior year of college to feel this kind of empathy for the scientific experience. Even studying under the kindest and most encouraging of teachers will never help you to achieve that feeling so long as you are restricted to a textbook and the occasional lame experiment wherein you are asked to calculate the coefficient of friction for a block of wood you have no intention of taking home to meet your mother. I wonder, had I experienced the thrill of making my own discoveries earlier in life, if things might have been different.

I guess I’ll just have to live with the constant thrill of making visible what is invisible and making audible what is inaudible. Not a bad deal, if you ask me.

Given that I’ve been agonizing for days over what to write for my first post, I decided it was appropriate to share the first poem from the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney. I think it speaks well to all people, but especially to those who are artistic in one way or another. I first came across this poem almost a year ago now, but it has more recently begun to sink in as I continue to work at musical composition. Whereas I have been so easily muted in the past by concerns ranging from insufficient complexity to unoriginality, I am growing to realize, with the help of wonderful professors, that an artist must intimate his works with staggering honesty. Sophistication and depth of style will emerge naturally if we are committed to the study of our art, but if we are afraid to admit what we see or hear or feel inside of ourselves, we have choked ourselves before we have begun to sing.

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear She might take some pleasure of my pain:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others’ leaves to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay,
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
‘Fool’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’