The Astrophysics Students

fuck knows/100

yes i am definetly restarting this thing

WELL I JUST FINISHED MY EXAMS AND IT WENT ACTUALLY PRETTY FUCKING WELL HOLY SHIIITTT

now time to study whatever the fuck i want

I have been waiting for this moment a long time

So I found this App called ‘Xe’.

It’s like a game, and really easy to use.

You select a pronoun, and there are quite a few.

And they give you all the conjugations, kind of like all those old language lessons in high school.

And after a few examples, they’ll test ya!

Type in your answer. If you get it wrong, you can try again no sweat.

All in all I thought it was pretty cool and I know I’ll be using it in the future!

You can try it for yourself and learn more about pronouns and the network Minus18 with these links. Happy learning everyone!

What if after Neil died, Todd went and visited Neil's grave every day and one day, a few years after graduation, he went to Neil's grave and set a ring on the head stone asking if Neil would marry him. Neil would have obviously said yes if he were still alive so Todd buries the ring a little under the ground near the headstone and wears his around just to remind him of his first and last love. The ring is engraved with Neil's name and the day he killed himself.

(Thank you for this very sad headcanon @/the.poet.and.the.actor on Instagram.)

I SWEAR I SWEAR I SCREAMED ALL THIS MORNING AFTER BINGING IT

I sat through Casanova only to have THIS KIND OF ENDING????????????

An accurate description of the life of a 1st year astrophysics major:

going to class and your professor talking fondly about the "wonderful feeling after the elevator cable snaps while you're in it"

said professor then proceeding to play a rock song

on most days only expect 2-5 students in class even though we have 13

where did the others go?? nobody knows, maybe they were abducted by aliens

speaking of aliens

your other professor pausing class to talk about what would happen if we met them

and getting mildly upset that an asteroid is no longer headed towards earth

cats

just so many physics department cats

and celebrating their birthdays

nobody in the department sleeps

don't be alarmed when your professor goes to the group chat at 3am to talk about whatever

hating elon musk

somehow other majors don't think astrophysics majors actually attend school until they meet you

there are days where we only talk about why star trek wasn't safe (they never wore seatbelts for a long time!!)

we like frogs

and rocks

rock go brrrr

sometimes finding your professor's face photoshopped onto satellites

working for hours but having 0 progress

your prof. assuring you that this is normal even for professionals

random scifi talks and book recs

cats

everyone in the dept likes greek letters

getting back to your dorm at almost midnight

the hall is eerily quiet but nobody is asleep

crying over the moon is normal

so is crying over the mars rovers

crying in general is normal

your professor saying odd things like

"this is just some weird image of two people about to die- but anyway, spacetime"

the astronomers of the school are also the astrologers

setting up in the lounge reading people's birth charts and astro cards

having to sneak through the back of the building because our id cards never work

sitting in the observatory with the lights off waiting for the professor to get there

planning to bring your hallmates to the planetarium to impress them

did i mention the cats?

meow

why do we have things that glow?

and this????

idk might make a pt. 2 or not

I just want to be an elf and have a human girlfriend and after she dies she would reincarnate into another cute elf girl.

Am I asking for too much?!

holy fucking shit op this is raw emotion

Any suggestions/inspiration for a STEM-focused, dark academia aesthetic? I'm something of a reformed humanities student finishing an engineering degree this time around.

I think STEM in Dark Academia is an underappreciated aesthetic. The humanities seek to understand what it is to be human, and this is a complex venture indeed. But studying STEM means you seek to understand the world around you. And my God, are there mysteries to be uncovered. Let’s go down the list together, shall we?

SCIENCE.

Latin words fall from your lips as easily as a prayer, and isn’t there piety in this? Devotion, worship? There must be, for you to be able to dig your hands into the breathing body of the world around you and have it speak back. Messily scrawled chemical equations are practically tattooed onto your arms and hands, and sometimes you wake with the molecular structure of a human red blood cell drawn carefully on your heart with no memory of putting it there, but it moves with the pulse of your heart. Bubbling beakers and plumes of emerald, cobalt, violet flame. Faded lab coats. Hair cut short or pulled back neatly, not a single tendril hanging down. Dirt under fingernails, sleeves rolled up and out of the way. You know poisons, toxins, you know the pump of blood through arteries, you know how close we are to death, and you know how it feels to hold the hand of human long dead, still cold from the cooler. Death hates you, because you are helping humanity evade it.

TECHNOLOGY.

Lines and lines of code stare back at you from the over-bright screen of your monitor. You know, you know that we could be more, that the future is a few keystrokes away if only you can organize your tumbling thoughts and the wall of symbols in front of you. You like the way robots move; tiny, carefully planned, yet oh so jerky motions that can’t help but remind you of when a baby deer takes its first quivering steps. You think humans were like this once, in the beginning. You think the movement in a motor resembles the inner workings of a human heart. You imagine the veins that pump blood through your body as wires on a circuit board delivering electricity from one place to another. Leather shoes laced as tightly as possible, tiny blueprints doodled on the soles. Bronze bells hanging from a bedroom window, a crumbled silk shirt. How far can you push at the boundaries of what is possible before something breaks? Will it be you or reality that gives first?

ENGINEERING.

What is it about the smoothing of clay into shapes that makes humanity stop and say, “This must be what it feels like to be God”? How much more can you feel it, with the power in your fingertips and in the corners of your mind to make things humans could never do? To push civilization past its breaking point and remake it anew, better, stronger, more than God ever did? What is the difference between man and machine, and should you even care in the first place? You are like God alright, you are participating in something divine, something holy. You double check every equation and think about what it means to be alive. You decide that, in the ever moving cogs of this great clock, you will be the first piece that moves, the one that pushes the others to succeed. Pencils stabbed into messy buns, lipstick stains on pale coffee cup rims. Your eyes are sharp and focused, but your thoughts are ever moving and desperate with desire to create, to bound forward into the future you are oh so carefully envisioning, every piece laid out and pinned down within an inch of its life. Children are starving, the world is burning, and you can do something, you can fix this, because if you don't, who else can? Who else will?

MATHEMATICS.

What is math? A meaningless formal game. Above the door at Plato’s Academy were inscribed the words, “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.” How can it be that both are true? A secret language exists that no one is born into, but is available to all willing to learn. Astronomy, the constant ever cycling of the universe around us, our own home a puzzle piece in a cosmic dance. Meandering lines of equations that are beautiful, beautiful, because you know what they mean and they speak to you, they sing. You write them with calligraphy pens and hang them above your desk, they are as much an expression of the human condition as a Picasso; show our creativity more than a Monet. Hands dirty from dragging them over cramped pages of numbers and graphite dust, equations traced into the foggy glass of your favorite coffee shop, messy hair and bitten down nails, math pun t-shirts under tweed blazers, the theory of relativity scrawled sloppily on your knee, the world around you the sum of shapes and numbers and you can see it, you can hear it.

STEM in Dark Academia is nonstop in its restlessness. There is always more to be discovered, further to push, limits that can and will be broken. There is a darkness to that beauty, a madness that permeates the cracks of every field. A historian could have told you not to make the atom bomb. A scientist can’t help themself from seeing how much destruction is possible.

Learning to like Physics

I actually cannot believe how much I used to hate Physics until last year, but then I actually took the time and effort to understand it and?? it’s so cool and fun and easy?? unreal.

It literally seemed impossible for me and I legit thought I wouldn’t be able to graduate because I was never gonna pass Physics (I’m a Math major so we actually have 4 required Physics courses). I don’t know what the point of this is but, don’t be afraid of Physics guys!! (or any other subject!!) yes it’s frustrating as hell and you feel dumb for not having a clue about what is happening or how to work out the problems but I swear once it clicks for you (and it will) it’s gonna be great.

So if anyone needs a step by step (for college/uni), here’s one:

Google is your best friend, the internet has plenty of videos/papers/worked out problems for you to check out. The most important thing to look for is drawings and videos that help you visualize what’s going on. In most of general physics, the key is to see what forces are acting, and from that follows everything else.

Know your core equations. Honestly it’s always the same ones in the end.

For mechanics: you absolutely gotta know Newton’s Laws, Work and its relation to Kinetic/Potential Energy. Momentum is also important.

For thermodynamics: First and Second Law of Thermodynamics; pV = nRT, Boyle/Gay Lussac etc (note that they’re all connected), Carnot’s Cycle.

For electromagnetism: Maxwell’s equations. This is as far as I’ve gotten in my studies.

Understand where the formulas come from, rather than learning them by heart. For me, this was necessary because my memory is absolutely shit so there was no way I could remember every variation. But most of the formulas actually do make sense, and once you’ve drawn out a diagram of what’s happening, you can work them out yourself.

For the previous point, I suggest you watch and rewatch your professor’s explanation until you get the gist. Don’t get discouraged if it’s not immediately crystal clear, seek out other explanations if you need to. Then try to do it yourself.

ASK. FOR. HELP. I cannot stress this enough, do not feel ashamed about asking questions in class or during office hours. There are no stupid questions, and you’re paying thousands every year for people to teach you. Also physics is hard, so you’re pretty much expected to not understand immediately. Moreover, I can guarantee there’s at least one other person in the room with the same question who’s too afraid to ask. I was that person, and I failed the class because of it. Don’t be me.

Practice until you’re able to do most variations of standard problems. Once you’re able to do a certain problem, try to change it and see what happens. You don’t have to crunch the numbers all over again, go with your intuition first. Then you can calculate everything and see if you were correct.

This is all I’ve got at the moment. It applies to General Physics because I’m still pretty shit at Mathematical Physics (Rational Mechanics?) lmao, which is why I don’t talk about Lagrangians and such here.

If anyone has any other tips (for Mathematical Physics as well!) , please feel free to add them. Note that I’m from Italy, and this is what it was like for me. Other countries might have different ways of testing or focus on some formulas that I haven’t included. Do what works for you, obviously.

Good luck STEM students, I know it’s hard, but hopefully worth it in the long run :)

someone please let crowley hear his wahoo

Dark academia is more classic and mysterious, it's not just about the studying part :))

tell me im wrong