The quest for knowledge is a most exciting endeavour, and for me, it brings a tremendous amount of amazement. Learning new things, pushing my horizons, is how science has courted me for so much of my life. From the time when I was six years old, when my mind went through a period of “inflation” with The Magic School Bus, and I learned everything from planets to paleontology to pathology, to now, where I follow “learning for learning's sake”, knowledge has been a huge goal. And I've extended this from not only science, to everything.

    Every day I log on to my computer to learn something new about science. I have a list of blogs and web sites that I check every day to read newest developments in science. On a typical day, this could take three to four hours since I try to get as many views as I can. However, these ministories only play one part; lectures play another large part. Every second Friday of the month, the Santa Monica Amateur Astronomy Club meets at 7:30 with speakers from UCLA, JPL, or Caltech about the frontiers of science. I heard Dr. Richard Ellis lecture about finding the youngest galaxies in the universe and that captivated me. He looks out to the edge of our universe and our knowledge, trying to piece together how it works. That's definitely a job I envy. Additionally there are monthly Von Karman lectures held at JPL that I attend. The last one was about the progressing Mars Science Laboratory, which would be ideally launched next year and land in 2010. I'd be a sophomore in college and hopefully would be able to understand some of that data, and maybe even make a contribution! I look forward to this exciting mission and await not only the new answers that arrive, but the new questions as well. Additionally, there are the Carnegie lectures at the Huntington library where I learned the difference between the experimentalists and theorists in astronomy. It was at one the Carnegie lectures when I learned about how little we really know about seemingly mundane topics such as star formation and lifetimes. There is so much data which has been collected and yet, so many unexplainable oddballs in that data that theorists are struggling to explain them. For example NGC 1333, a very young nebula with numerous jets shooting every which way; for each jet, finding its source is a separate Ph.d thesis. The world of astronomy is so dynamic, I cannot fathom any way to become disinterested. In case that infinitesimal probability occurs, I go to the Watson lectures at Caltech just for the science. They cover subjects from nanotechology to neuroscience, even both! While I don't plan to get into these fields, they're still incredibly fascinating, and the new ideas and techologies that come from these fields are just plain cool. Caltech has already played a large role in expanding my scientific interests, and because of it I can safely say that I know more about autistic mice than anyone else at my school.

    Of course, my intellectual curiosity isn't just limited to science and astronomy. I've joined my school's academic decathlon two years ago precisely for expanding my knowledge. The first year, it was about China with a science subject of climatology. Now, the climatology was interesting, but I was captivated by China because I hadn't given it much thought. Learning about the Mongol rule in the Yuan dynasty, or the peculiarities of Chinese music really expanded my mind past my America-centric history and music education. Last year's topic was the Civil War and infectious diseases and this year, it's Mexico with evolution. On that subject, evolution has captivated me because of its widespread resistance in America. Despite it being one of the best-supported theories in science, the pseudoscientific arguments against it amaze me. I actually enjoy reading these criticisms and counting all of the fallacies that have been used. Anyway, one more subject that has very recently enthralled me is pure mathematics: proofs and logic. With the help of a book and a math teacher, I spend most of my lunches working through problems and gaining a hold on concepts which aren't taught in math classes. This saddens me because most of my fellow students hate proofs; in geometry, they're taught as convoluted explanations, not as the elegant reasoning processes they are. Though, I'm sure there are many things that I haven't been taught correctly, but like science, I can eventually discover them. And once I reach the limit of what we can explain, I hope to start pushing and expanding our horizons!