i met a NASA scientist in conversation at a passover celebration this weekend. she was icy and poised and stunningly beautiful; she was unimpressed by the conversation on how moissanite was originally discovered in a meteorite, and she really hated the next bit about whether or not the moon landing really happened. she has a phd in astrophysics, a master's degree in international science and technology policy, another master's degree from the international space university, and i've never immediately wanted to be someone so badly.

unfortunately, unlike the astrophysicist, i am not a real scientist. i've held the title of research mathematician and i currently hold the title of research scientist, but i tell everyone that i'm an engineer because this is not a real scientific field, though i forget this fact all the time. it's true, though — machine learning researchers are mostly rejects from the hard sciences. throw a dart around a lab of machine learning researchers and you're likely to hit an ex-theoretical physicist, an ex-international math olympiad team member, several electrical engineering phds, literal rocket scientists. they're a dime a dozen around here — too stupid to cure cancer or map out new planets or discover fundamental laws about the universe; just bright enough to publish papers about mathematical models of the internet, work on supercomputing infrastructure, and play competitive Set at parties. historically, the really good physicists and mathematicians get scooped up fresh out of graduate school to become quantitative researchers, but these days the quant-turned-AI-researcher pipeline is very strong. they're extraordinarily sharp, but they're not immune to the siren call of capitalism and career prestige.

so we try to make ourselves feel better by slapping a grand mission over the whole thing; we frame the the quest for superintelligence as a sort of ultimate truth-seeking. everyone loves handwaving at information theory because you can obviously convince yourself that there is something interesting about the question of how many bits is required to represent the entire internet; that there is something fascinating in the problem of how we can compress the entirety of modern human knowledge into a mathematical model, a search engine to query, a chatbot, yes. a really fast one! faster than your average undergraduate student! is it sentient? no, but it doesn't need to be sentient to be interesting. scientists have pursued the creation of thinking machines throughout history because superintelligence is inherently a worthy endeavour. even the philosophers agree that the act of building superintelligence gets us closer to some truth about how humans acquire knowledge and rationale and reason — nevermind that some of us never acquire any at all.

being a public intellectual is the ultimate cringe profession but socrates was right about at least one thing: there is virtue in truth-seeking. every ex-pure-mathematician-turned-machine-learning-researcher was once a bright-eyed undergraduate convinced that mathematics is the foundation of the universe and if only we mastered analysis on the complex plane and multidimensional geometry and figured out how to prove things in non-euclidean space then we would get closer to knowing something true. mathematical models are compelling because they are an approximation of truth that can be tweaked and learned; not true but measurably close to it. no one goes into astrophysics thinking that they will one day work at Jane Street; they start out hoping that they might acquire a deep understanding of the physical universe — its origin, structure, evolution, and ultimately, its fate — by uncovering the fundamental laws and processes that govern it. we all just want to know where we came from and where we're going. what is the physical context for humanity’s place? why do we exist and how did we get here and why am i like this and how does it all end? did the tides of the moon and the movement of the planets and the shape of the stars at the time of my birth conspire in spacetime to make me like this? how did we collide and what are the ways in which we will orbit each other? are we destined to wreck each other in a fiery, all-consuming collision? am i governed by known laws of the universe? does a fire sign excuse my impulsiveness; my impatience; my insensitivity to other people's feelings, my reckless need for freedom and the way i want to love you fiercely and forever while being prone to restlessness and avoidance? can the stars provide order to this madness and most importantly, can they fix me?

it is tempting to offload our understanding of the world to the placement of the stars; to let ourselves be governed by the chaos of the solar system. astrology gives us excuses; lets us resign ourselves to our worst flaws because the planets happened to line up a certain way nine months after your parents decided to have sex. the truth is much more compelling, but it demands more of us: the stars do tell us something about how we got here and where we're going; the movement of the planets does tell us something about our connection to the cosmos and the exchange of materials between planets and the repeated cycles of destruction and renewal in the early solar system and the way that cosmic processes started and stopped several times before finally taking place on earth.
if i understood how this all came to be then maybe i could understand how something is made — not made new, for nothing is made new, not really; not ever. the elements that make up the human body were forged in the cores of ancient stars and distributed across the cosmos by supernovae and stellar collisions. we are are cosmic history; connected directly to the lifecycles of stars and the evolution of galaxies. do you wonder how we came to exist together in this sliver of spacetime after the big bang and before the death of the sun, a fleeting moment in the cosmic timeline? do we expand forever, collapse, reach a steady state? if change is the only constant, what do we become? what happens after we all return to stardust? and isn't all of this infinitely more interesting than using cosmic tea leaves to guess whether the transit of neptune will make or break your situationship? resist the temptation to reduce star patterns to something so mundane when their truth is so much extraordinary. the entire universe is laid out in front of you, holding answers to questions about our origin and significance and destiny. the future is unknowable but a mathematical model gives us a way to anticipate it. the existence of neptune was predicted by newtonian mechanics before it was ever observed.

oh, you're just a girl? have you considered being a girl in search of fundamental truths about the universe? if girlhood is a spectrum from "blames venus for her problems" to "yay katy perry goes to space" to "literal NASA researcher", i hope that my daughter becomes a NASA researcher. i'm a better engineer than scientist, but i appreciate the scientific method — i want to spend this lifetime making strange observations and conducting weird little experiments and developing theories about the universe and the human condition and making up origin stories and marvelling at this slice of spacetime we have together. i want to know everything about everything and i want to learn all about everything with you.

To reply you need to sign in.