Physics

As a youngster growing up in the little town of Westford, Mass., with a mother who had Parkinson’s Disease but who could function pretty well because she was young, I was afraid of death and told my mother I would invent a magic pill that would keep me alive forever. So I decided to major in chemistry at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. But after a couple months of frustrations in my Quantitative Analysis class — I just didn’t have the patience to carry out the measurements plus the instructor was horrible — I said “To heck with this!” and switched to physics. After all, physics had been getting a lot of media play, what with the atom bomb and all, and might satisfy another craving I had which was to understand the universe. ha ha Well, I actually ended up as a physicist back in the 1950’s but as the years went on I gradually switched over to more mundane engineering work such as computer simulations of solid state transistors. My childhood dream of a pill to extend life forever had become a long forgotten and silly youthful fantasy.

But wait! Just recently I read where red wine can extend the lifespan of mice dosed with resveratrol, an ingredient of some red wines. In fact the report states that some scientists are already taking resveratrol in capsule form. The report also states that serious scientists have long derided the idea of life-extending elixirs. However, quoting from the report, “the door may now have been opened to drugs that exploit an ancient biological survival mechanism, that of switching the body’s resources from fertility to tissue maintenance. The improved tissue maintenance seems to extend life by cutting down on the degenerative diseases of aging”.

OK, is there still hope for me? And I didn’t even have to work on the magic pill project! ha ha

Perhaps I should mention the books I’m in the process of reading or have read recently. I just finished The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton, and before that the Irish novel The Gathering by Anne Enright which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Now I’m trying to simultaneously read The Private Life of the Brain by Susan Greenfield, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies. I’ve already read the latter — see here — so this will be a re-read. Also, I’m still dabbling in Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, a very heavy physics book for the “general reader”. Plus, there’s a bunch of stuff online on physics, cosmology, philosophy, and religion that I’m trying to keep up with. Incidentally, there’s a great put-down by Terry Eagleton of The God Delusion here.

My objective is to straddle science, philosophy and religion and see what kind of a mixture I might end up with, if any.