Armchair Astronaut
At first, the stars gave Eugene Chiang the cold shoulder.
Actually, it was Earth running interference. Chiang, then 12, would haul his telescope out at night on Long Island, New York, only to find his view wrecked by city lights or tall trees. On many nights, the cold drove him inside.
"It was hard to find a good patch of sky that was really open," Chiang remembers with a laugh. "That's why I became a theorist."
Chiang, now 29, is a university professor and theorist on NASA's
Deep Ecliptic Survey, a detailed study of the farthest reaches of our solar system. The team uses powerful telescopes to search for giant chunks of ice and rock - the fossils of our solar system - in the
Kuiper Belt, a disk-shaped zone of debris more than 4.8 billion kilometers (3 billion miles) from Earth.
Chiang calculates the paths of these mysterious objects that are just about at the edge of what a telescope can detect. By mapping out their trajectories and comparing them to his theoretical simulations, he tries to piece together the sequence of events that lead to the formation of the planets.
Chiang is happy to leave most of the actual observing to his colleagues. One trip to a telescope high atop a dormant volcano in Hawaii reminded him of his chilly introduction to stargazing. The theoretical world is much warmer.
"I prefer to sit in my sunny office and think," he said.
'Keep Asking Questions'
Chiang credits his love of physics to role models both real and fictional. He grew up watching real-life scientist Carl Sagan's Cosmos and the British science fiction series Dr. Who on television.
"I remember telling my mom I couldn't decide who I admired most," Chiang said. "Carl was real. But science fiction interested me, too, because it is about the future possibilities of physics. As far as I could tell,
Dr. Who used physics to save the universe every week. It wasn't magic. It was physics."
He still loves sci fi movies.
"The Matrix is my favorite science fiction movie," he said. "I can't think of a more hip or more dramatic story."
Chiang has done a little acting of his own, too. He played Romeo in college and especially enjoyed acting in comedies.
Following the sage advice of one of his graduate mentors, Chiang works hard to stay in shape. It's easy to spend countless hours in a chair plotting orbit simulations and pondering mysteries of the universe, so he rides his bike to work at the University of California at Berkeley. He also likes working out and playing squash.
When he's working in his office, he often listens to '80s music like the New Order, the Smiths and the Cure. He goes really old school when he really needs to think.
"I like Bach best," Chiang said of the 18th Century German composer. "He's very structured, and creates rich, beautiful music from what seem like a few simple rules and a single instrument. It's not unlike the dynamical structure of planetary systems. Beautiful, complex patterns emerge from one simple rule like Newton's law of gravity."
Those rules - how planets and stars are bound together in a cosmic dance - fueled Chiang's passion for physics. To him, science is much more than a collection of facts to memorize, it's a process by which questions are constantly asked to challenge the status quo and push the envelope of understanding.
"Keep asking questions - that's the most important thing," Chiang said. "There is no such thing as a stupid question. Very often, the simplest questions are the most fundamental ones."
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