A friend of mine was manning the table for the physics society at my university during the club expo in the first week of school, and someone came up to the table, looked at the quantum mechanics textbook that was sitting there and said: “You must love physics to study it.” When they mentioned that to me, we were thinking about the how hard the classes are this year and we agreed pretty hard: yeah, we must love it.

And when I considered not just the difficult classes, but the amount of hurdles I had to overcome just to get here to study physics, the struggles and years of work to be able to even enroll in this program, I realized: Wow, I must really love it.

And then a few days later one of our classmates actually changed majors from physics to economics. One day he was in class panicking with the rest of us about the difficult math, the next he had all new classes. It’s a pretty bold move, changing majors in your third year of undergrad, and we were all pretty shocked about it. Then my friend said: “He must not have loved it.”

And then that prompted a pretty cool conversation over coffee, in which we each shared the one moment where we realized that we love it. I mentioned in About Me that I had expressed an interest in physics in high school, but thinking back, I realized that I wasn’t really in love with it then. It was more of just a passing fancy, something that seemed “kind of cool.”

My moment happened after I had gone to Sudbury and was working on rebuilding my life. I had gotten an apartment by then and moved out of the shelter, and as a reward my best friend took me to visit Science North, a science education center in the city. It’s a pretty neat place to visit, I highly recommend it at least once: https://www.sciencenorth.ca/ .

Inside the lobby there was an exhibit on SNOLAB, which is where my friend works, and he was explaining to me the solar neutrino problem. If you’re interested in learning about it, check out the post in my brand-new Science Snippets section: The Solar Neutrino Problem. But if not, TL;DR: people were seeing about a third of the neutrinos from the sun that they expected to see until they discovered that they change “flavours” as they move.

I think I was just as surprised as my friend was when I finished his sentence.
Friend: “And that means – “
Me: “They have mass.”
Friend: <shocked silence> “Yes. That sentence you just finished for me won Art McDonald of the McDonald Institute a Nobel Prize.”

That moment is really what started it all for me. That’s when I started wanting to learn more and more, and realizing that I had a knack for it, and that I loved it. And if I think back to who I was in high school when physics was just a passing fancy, that may have been the wrong time for me to get into it. I don’t think I loved it enough to really commit to it back then, and I may have ended up like my classmate that changed majors in third year. In a way, as hard as it has been, my path has led me not only where I need to be, but when I needed to be there.

So now it’s your turn. Think about your life and what you’re doing. Do you love it? If so, when was your moment that you knew? If not, maybe your still on a path that will lead you where you need to go, when you need to be there. Maybe your moment is still coming.