A GOOD LAUGH AT ME!!

I love to read.  Been a reader since I was a kid.  One of my earliest memories is of Mom taking me to the Lebanon, Ohio library to find books.  When we moved to Pinellas Park, Florida I was old enough to walk myself to the library and it was an excellent place to hide when I didn’t feel like working in the family grocery store.

My taste in reading is rather eclectic.  I don’t really enjoy many novels, mostly I read non-fiction.  There are occasional forays into the fiction realm, but typically only by the very excellent recommendation of a good friend.  

Recently I started using the ‘Good Reads’ app to track my reading history and keep a list of books I want to read.  That was one of my challenges…I would hear about a book that sounded interesting and until ‘Good Reads’ came along I would often forget about the book and it would disappear into the mists of my world, being forgotten because my memory does not serve me well.

So books get added to my list of “want to read” through various channels;  Recommendations from friends, next in line through some contrived list, (currently among other reads, I am reading biographies of US Presidents in chronological order), lists of recommendations from outside sources, bibliographies of books I have read, etc, etc.

Anyway, somehow the book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil De Grasse Tyson ended up on my list.  Don’t ask how, I have no idea.  Although I have seen Dr. Tyson interviewed on TV a couple of times and found him intriguing. 

Due to the pandemic I have been getting a lot more reading in than usual and this week I borrowed the book from the library thinking it would be a good change of pace.  Ha, ha. I made my mistake thinking this book would be an easy read.  Had the title been Astrophysics for Dummies I might have been on the right track!!

So here’s the back story.  My family moved to Florida over the summer between my 3^rd and 4^th grades.  Should have been no big deal as far as school was concerned, and for the most part it wasn't…except for Math.  In Ohio at the end of 3^rd grade we had just finished up with Subtraction.  At Pinellas Park Elementary 4^th grade Math started with Long Division.  See the problem?  I missed Multiplication completely.  Believe it or not, that is a big deal!

Needless to say Math became the bane of my existence.  I have memories of sitting at the kitchen table with Dad saying, “What is 3x4?”  My answer, “12”.  Then he would ask “What is 4x3?” and I would start crying because I didn’t know.  

For some reason in 8^th grade I took Algebra.  I have very vivid memories of my friend Rik McNeill trying to coach me through Algebra homework and screaming at me, “Why can you remember the words to a song after one listening but you can’t remember a simple algebraic formula?”  He got very frustrated with me.  

Then there was the era when management at big corporations thought they should enhance employee knowledge by building on their weakness.  This played out for me by my manager assigning me a project that was heavily math based, telling me that it would build my math skills!!  Ha!! My unspoken response was, "Honey you aren’t going to fix something that has been broken since 3^rd grade!!"

Back to the topic at hand, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry; while Dr. Tyson does not spell out the mathematical formulas per say, this book is written for people with a more advanced knowledge of Math than mine.  I am on page 106 of 189 and I understand about .05% of what I’ve read so far.  I do have a minuscule understanding of the concept of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’.  But please don’t ask me what the Greek letter ‘lambda’ signifies in Einstein’s equation of gravity.

The really good thing that has come out of reading this book so far…I have a much greater appreciation for what I don’t know.  I mean…you go through life thinking you are fairly knowledgeable…college educated, well traveled, responsible jobs through the years…but I say with all humility, I don’t understand Astrophysics at all!!!