I Don't Even Like Kool Aid!

I was 16 when I took my last Physics class. It was the first time I had a choice about whether or not I wanted to take Physics and I had chosen to take Physics. A subject full of logic and reason and proof. Heard about gravity? See this ball? See this ball drop to the ground? Gravity. That was when I was 15.

Then at 16, in that first class of the year, my Physics teacher started on a spiel. How excited he was. Yes, yes, he had told us, for four years in a row, that protons and electrons were the smallest particles known to man. But wait... there was more! Quarks. Up quarks and down quarks. Wha? You mean like ducks, we wondered? No. QUARKS. Going up and down, apparently. They had never been seen but they were there. We just had to believe. Oh, but he didn't stop there.

Remember how, when you were 15, and you learnt that matter can neither be created nor destroyed? Yeah, well, let's rethink that. There is this thing called antimatter and when antimatter meets antimatter you end up with nothing. Nothing? Yup, he said, nothing. To drive the point home, he said that out there was an Anti-Pandave and if, by chance, we happened to cross paths and bump into each other, even if it is totally by mistake, there will be nothing. No Pandave; no Anti-Pan. Just nothing. Not even a puff of smoke! I mean, really, not even a puff of smoke. What kind of chicanery is that? We just had to believe he said. We would learn and our worlds would expand, and it would be incredible.

He was fired up, my Physics teacher was. He could barely keep his feet on the ground and his arms were flailing about. And I thought - I can't do this. He wants me to accept a new religion. A religion of unseen quarks that go in all directions; a religion of an anti-me I should pray I never meet. That is just unacceptable. To accept would mean to live in fear of becoming nothing while walking around just minding my own business. To accept would mean I could never hug a stranger again - who knows what would happen then?

So, at 16, I left my Physics class and walked into a Latin class. I walked in to speak of love and hate, of victory and defeat, of Catullus and Pliny. For how could I embrace a new religion when it didn't even come with chocolate, popcorn or ice cream?