Your Friendly Neighborhood Scientist

Being a scientist is just a job. In fiction and popular media, scientists are often portrayed as being the only elite minds capable of solving the world's problems, or as being socially inept weirdos who have no grasp on the real world. I think the former idea might come from the latent hope in all of us that there is someone running the world who actually knows what they're doing, and the latter comes from the fact that many scientists didn't pay enough attention to other subjects in school. Regardless of the cause though, I have found that most people have never met a scientist in real life, so their expectations of us are larger than life in many ways. 

I'd like this blog to serve as a bit of an opportunity to get to know a scientist as a regular living, breathing person. When I'm at work, I think about things that might sound complex and foreign to you, but that path runs both ways. Whenever a skilled professional tells me about how to fix a car, or patch a hole in drywall, or write an expense report, or dream up fiction, I feel like I'm listening to someone speak a different language and I'm the dumbest person in the world. This doesn't make either of us smart or dumb, we're just different, and I'm so glad we're different, because we need each other. You know lots of things that I can barely understand, and thank goodness for that because no matter how many chemical reaction mechanisms I write out, they won't fix my leaky faucet.

We can also learn from each other. I'll never need to know how to build a whole house, but I should probably learn how to do basic things like patching drywall. In the same vein, since science is all about using tools to separate the truth from lies and noise, I think everyone could benefit from learning to use some basic scientific tools and ideas. That's another one of the big things I want to communicate with this blog, that science belongs to everyone.

I hope that spending time here makes science seem a little less scary and gives you an opportunity to get to know me as a person who does science rather than as a big fancy scientist. Unlike what some media would have you believe, I don't spend all of my time outside of work doggedly pursuing my next theorem or digging through crates at the comic book shop. Instead, outside of work I hang out with friends and family, making dumb jokes and bad decisions. I play music and drink beers and share memes. I'm rarely a genius, I'm often a dumbass, and I hope that at least on some level I can also be your friend.

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