It’s no secret that I watch too many TV shows. Lately, I’ve gotten into a crime/mystery/sci-fi show called Fringe. It’s about an FBI agent, a crazy old scientist and his bad boy son. It’s got similarities with Bones, and you know how I love the (propably very unscientific) science talk. But when Bones is a lot of medicine, forensic anthropology and some geology as well, Fringe is just incredible amounts of theoretical physics and chemistry.
And that has made me realise. Chemistry is just so cool. That’s the magic. Not physics, as I’ve always thought, that’s just calculations and probabilities and things that are impossible to grasp. Chemistry is actual stuff. Things you can touch. Matter, in the way that is actually understandable for humans – but still so complex and just, like, exciting. There are infinite things you can do with chemistry. Now, after Fringe, I actually think that chemistry is the key to understanding the world. Atleast the one within our mental limits.
I kind of wish I could get into chemistry now. Change direction completely and start dressing in lab coats and wearing protective glasses all the time. I think I could’ve become a decent chemist. I think I’ve written it before, or else I’ve just thought it, that I have a certain tendency toward meticulousness that I imagine could become handy in a lab. Previously, I’ve thought about it in terms of the possibility of becoming a quaternary geologist – but I think the same principle could work for more traditional chemistry too.
But it’s too late, I’m afraid. With the weeks I have left of student loans, I would only barely be able to get a Bachellor’s in chemistry, and with a Bachellor’s degree you don’t get to do any of the fun stuff. Not to mention that I would have to spend about a year to study the highschool chemistry and physics that I never took way back when, in order to be accepted to the university program. I feel old already as it is, still studying on the undergraduate level while almost all of my classmates were born during the 90s. No, I’ll just have to stick to the geography that I started with.
But in another, alternate reality, where I chose to major in science instead of social science in highschool, I might have had Eva Allard in chemistry instead of geography (believe it or not, those were the two subjects she was teaching, this lovely monument of a pedagogue that is partly responsible for me ending up at the physical geography department at Stockholm University in the fall of 2009). What an intriguing thought. There is no knowing where I might have ended up.
Meanwhile, in this universe, I’ll have to make due with pseudo-scientific TV shows. Pretty enjoyable, that too.
Katja Malmborg 