Just a Bunch of Atoms Thinking

 Staring at my father’s worn, college-era dictionary, one word caught my eye. ‘ Self-awareness, noun : The conscious knowledge of one's own character.’   I grabbed a pen. ‘... one's own character s ’ Ok, that looks better.  ___________________________________________________________________________________ May 21, 2018. Seoul, South Korea. I was "Captain." The student body president, the popular kid, the one who always leads others. I was gravitating others towards me, thinking I am the center of the universe. When my family needed to move to Mexico, I was confident I'd continue to lead. ___________________________________________________________________________________ September 11, 2020. Monterrey, Mexico. One day at school, a boy named Juan snatched my bag and called me a  stutterer . The words I needed to defend myself were trapped inside, and I ended up shouting a word no one could understand. The teacher, seeing my silence as guilt, made me apologize to Juan...

 "Sad is the man who is asked for a story / and can’t come up with one." — Li-Young Lee, "A Story" We often forget that our parents were just like us before they became parents. Just as this is our first time living, it is their first time raising a child. We can't blame them for their mistakes, yet I did. As a child, I saw my parents as God-like figures. They created me, they held all the answers to my endless questions. My first emotions, my first love—I learned everything from them. But I never recognized the simple truth that they are human, just like me. They make mistakes. They feel emotions. And maybe, just like me, they struggle to express them. Perhaps they, too, are afraid—afraid of the future, of the day I no longer need them, of being left behind as they push me forward. Just like the father in "A Story," they might not always have the right words, the perfect answers, or the ability to show their fears. Yet, they continue to love and suppo...

 Becoming. Does that mean I am transforming into someone entirely different than before? If you placed five-year-old me next to seventy-year-old me, would anyone say we are the same? We wouldn’t even have the same cells. The child, I once was, would dive into a pile of fallen leaves, pretending nothing could stop me. But look at the older version of me. He might see a quiet farewell in the fallen leaves, a small reminder of time slipping away. Why are we so different? And yet, aren’t we the same? Well, consider this. When I used to run down the school hallways with my friends, I had no fear. I was confident. I spoke, and people listened. I walked, and they followed. But look at me now. I hesitate before I speak, watching for reactions. I walk, adjusting my steps to match those around me. What changed? Can we still say I’m the same person as the child who always led others? How did I change so much? People often say  time  changes us. I disagree. If I had chosen to cling t...

                                            Transcript [Song Plays and Goes off] Host: You're listening to The Cosmic Hour. I'm your host, Robin, and today we have two very special guests joining us! The Universe and Human! Let's dive right into the debate. The question of the day! Is the universe inherently meaningful, or is it inherently meaningless? Universe, you can go first. Universe: Gladly. The universe is inherently meaningless. At the smallest scale, all objects are just composed of atoms governed by fundamental physical laws, as Charles de Quincey highlighted. These atoms have no purpose or meaning; they simply exist and follow the mechanics of nature. Take a rock and a human. The distinction between them is arbitrary and assigned by humans. In a quantum level, there is no difference between a rock and a human. Human: Well, I respectfully disagree. We, as humans, provi...

    (From Stephen Hawking’s interpretation of time)      Time, though we experience it constantly, remains ambiguous and often subjective. It can be measured by the period over which an action unfolds, but it also embodies an irreversible increase in entropy, a slow change from structured to disorder. Time for me and time for the universe would be very different – to the universe, human existence may be a blink of an eye, perhaps even shorter.      We can break down time into three phases: present, past, and future. But do they truly exist as distinct entities? I once wondered if we are, in fact, living entirely in the past and the future only. What we perceive as the ‘present’ is technically a moment that has already happened. For instance, when I observe flowers by the roadside, am I truly seeing them in the present? It might be more accurate to say that I am seeing them in the past because my brain needs milliseconds to process and interpret ...

Once, I was fascinated by the notion of determinism: everything that happens in the world—a cosmic explosion or a person's action—is fixed by preceding causes. But as I learned more about quantum mechanics, I stumbled into a life-determining debate with my past self. In the microscopic world, particle movement is probabilistic, existing as a cloud of probabilities, a wave of "maybes" until they finally "choose" a state. That's how it works in reality on the smallest scales—everything is technically possible, but some things are simply way more likely than others. Einstein held a deterministic view, famously asking Bohr, "Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?" Einstein rejected the notion of probabilities defining reality, but Bohr’s ideas offered a new lens. Bohr saw the world as inherently probabilistic, where reality isn’t fixed until observed. In the classical, deterministic view, everything is like a s...

 I am a rock, a tree, or even a bag of pretzels on my table. Or am I not? What a bizarre thought. I mean, I’m fairly certain I’m not a pretzel—unless, of course, there’s some parallel universe where pretzels write essays about their own existence. But let’s stick to this universe for now. When my curiosity gets too big to fit in my head, I lean on old, musty books who don’t mind my endless questions. “Atoms of iron were hard and strong... atoms of water were smooth and slippery like poppy seeds.” It was a line from an ancient, yellowing Physical Chemistry textbook by Walter J. Moore (1962) that my AP Chem teacher handed me after I wouldn’t stop talking about quantum physics. Everything is made of the same fundamental elements. So, why do iron and water feel so different? I mean, if string theory is correct, and the universe is made of tiny vibrating strings, then what really separates me from a rock, a tree, or, yes, the pretzel? I knew that there was more to me than just...