Assignment #1

The following attracts me to Chinese medicine:

1. It is a comprehensive and very well integrated healing modality.
2. It is highly regulated.
3. It is so interesting and the learning never stops.
4. I get to interact with people one-on-one and I do not have to sit at a desk all-day.
5. I enjoy the kind of people who work in this field.
6. It is extremely effective for a variety of heath problems.


What do I honestly think of physics?

I am intimidated by it and yet very interested in it. I enjoy finding rational explanations for how things work.

Now that I think about it, have I ever experienced time slowing down?

The only time I have been aware of this was when I was in labor. Time seemed more irrelevant than anything.

My reflections about time.

Usually when I think about time I am mostly concerned about not having enough of it or feeling like time is passing me by. Often I think about getting older. When my 92-year-old father became very sick and died last year, I started thinking about aging a lot. My dad had a long and very productive life, but his death made me acutely aware of the fact that life is relatively short in the grand scheme of things.

It was refreshing to think about time in a different context during last week's class. For example, I did not know that the Earth's rotation is slowing down. I also did not know about the incredible accuracy of atomic clocks and that they had to be set back by one second in order to accommodate the slowing down of the Earth's rotation. This was an interesting discovery!

I enjoyed contemplating the formation of the universe and the discussion about the first stars which formed in the universe. Of course I have contemplated this topic before, but have not thought about it in a longtime. It made me realize that my reflections about time are typically self-centered and very limited.