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 I was six years old, when my mind went through a period of inflation with The Magic School Bus where I learned everything from planets to paleontology to pathology, to now where I believe in the philosophy “learning for learning's sake”, knowledge has always been a huge goal. And I've extended this curiosity not only to science, but 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 for the newest scientific developments. On a typical day, this can take three to four hours since I try to get as much information as I can. However, these articles only play one part; lectures constitute 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. It was at these lectures where the distinction between theorists and experimentalists was clear. We have collected so much data, yet there are many unexplainable oddballs in that data that theorists are struggling to explain. One example is NGC 1333, a very young nebula with numerous jets shooting every which way; finding the source of each jet is a separate Ph.d thesis. Additionally, I attend the monthly Von Karman lectures at JPL. The last one was about the progressing Mars Science Laboratory, which would be ideally launched next year and land in 2010. As a sophomore in college I'd hopefully be able to understand some of that data, and maybe even make a contribution! I wonder what new questions and answers this mission will bring. Another two lecturers that I always love listening to are Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne. I've attended Hawking's lectures at Caltech for the past two years and I've learned something new each time. I also heard Thorne speak twice -- two years ago and on October 30; he always fascinates me with new explanations of gravity. I hope to be able to continue attending these lectures in college. For science in general, I also go to the Watson lectures at Caltech covering subjects from nanotechnology to neuroscience. While I don't plan to get into these fields, they're still incredibly fascinating, and the new ideas and technologies that come from them 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 joined my school's academic decathlon team two years ago precisely to expand my knowledge. The first year, the topics were China and the science of climatology. The climatology was interesting, but I was particularly 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 Western-centric history and music education. Last year's topic was the Civil War and its infectious diseases, and this year it's Mexico with evolution. In the past, 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. In addition, 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 discovering concepts that aren't taught in math classes. I am saddened because most of my fellow students hate proofs; in geometry, they're taught as convoluted explanations, not as the elegant reasoning processes they are. While I'm sure there are many things that I haven't been taught perfectly, I can eventually discover those flaws just as science does. And my goal is that once I reach the limit of our knowledge, I can start pushing and expand our horizons!