Here is why doing science is fun!

 For me, happiness lies in little moments of life. We can find happiness in small and little moments. The thing is just to see things from a different perspective. As I say in my language, something that is sorrowful in one rest frame can be happiness in another rest frame. You just need to find the right frame of reference. These are some events that made me happy in recent times. Some of them are simple things and some are historical. Let’s go through them one by one. 

Doing science is fun: Every student be it a science student or do assignments on the night of submission. I do the assignments on the night of submission but sometimes I underestimate the time it would take. If our teachers have given us a week to do this assignment it would be containing something that takes a week. But we students are overconfident and we think we can do this in one night. That’s where my friend we fail. 

So I was to write a program to find energy eigenstates of a system with given potential.  It is a typical problem of Quantum Mechanics and to be honest this is all I have done in QM in my whole life.  I had a written program and I just had to modify it. I was very clear about the approach. So when I started to write the program I wrote the algorithm on paper and also wrote down the steps. 

So I wrote the program and run it. It ran well, the plots of eigenstates looked fine. I was happy like I nailed it. But when I printed the eigenvalue of the ground-state wave function it came out to be positive. When I looked at the plots of eigenfunction, I guessed bound states.And bound states often have negative energy. But here I got a bound state with positive energy. That doesn’t make sense to me right then. 

For me, scattering states always meant positive energy and bound states always meant negative energy. I thought it is impossible to contain the particle in limits if it has total energy positive. 

I thought I might have made some mistakes in my program. I checked my program thoroughly. But I didn’t find any mistakes there. I was like what I have done is right but what I am getting is wrong. I had only two hours left to submit the assignment so I was in a panic. 

I took the chance to create a new file and wrote the whole program again in a new file and yet again the result was the same. I didn’t know what to do so asked my friend Deepanshu. I asked him-

“Bhai I am getting the positive eigenvalues.”

“So?”

“How can the energy eigenvalues be positive for a bound state?”

“There will be positive energy because the potential has minima at zero.”

At that moment everything was clear to me. Total energy has two terms, potential energy, and kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is always positive and in this case the potential energy is also positive then how can you expect any total energy to be negative. This is silly. 

I realized that I am silly. This is obvious. So I put the whole story in one quote as-

“Doing science is fun, one minute ago I was thinking how can this be possible this is impossible, and now I am thinking It is completely obvious I am a stupid science student.”

SO Doing science is like: