Chapter Content
Okay, so, where do I even begin? Well, three things, three things you should probably know about me right off the bat. First off, I was born, raised, pretty much lived my whole early life in the heart of East Los Angeles. Yeah, I'm five-eighths Mexican, one-quarter Cuban/Spanish, and get this, one-eighth Austrian. Go figure, right? And I absolutely, positively, *love* Mexican food. Couldn't live without it, honestly. Second thing, I'm, uh, I guess you could say I'm a bit of a rebel. Always have been. Ever since I was a little kid, I've kind of gone my own way, you know? Sometimes even to the point of being, like, deliberately contrary, just for the sake of it. And third, maybe the most important, I'm just curious about *everything*. Like, I drove my teachers totally bonkers with all my questions. In junior high, my math teacher, oh man, he *hated* me. I was constantly interrupting his class. Finally, he got so fed up, he started calling me "Michael Jillion," because, you know, I asked a jillion questions. But I honestly didn't even care. I just kept asking. Kept digging.
And in some ways, I really relate to Dr. Frankenstein. And not, like, in the sense of, you know, piecing together dead body parts and bringing them to life, obviously! What really gets me is his passion, that intense drive, you know, for wanting to know *how* the universe actually works. It's that burning question that I just find so cool.
In second grade, get this, I started dreaming, literally dreaming, of becoming a scientist. Like, in my sleep, at night, I would see myself wearing a white coat, working in a lab that was just crammed full of all kinds of crazy equipment. And, yeah, of course, being awarded the Nobel Prize! For what? I honestly can't remember. All I know is, I was happy as a pig in mud. Just, you know, living the dream, right?
So, chasing that, that blissful dream, that's what got me out of the barrio and, eventually, into UCLA, where I ended up earning a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics. Pretty cool, huh? And after that, I applied to, and actually got accepted by, the graduate physics department in several, you know, really famous universities.
The morning we were supposed to leave, we got this phone call, really early, from David Cassel, who was this physicist who was actually going to become my thesis chairman. And he was so cheerful. He was like, "Morning! Have you looked outside yet?" And I was like, "Uh, no." So I rushed over and opened the blinds on the window of our hotel room. And it was just, boom, a landscape completely covered in snow. And he just sang out, "Welcome to Ithaca!"
A few months later, I went back to Cornell by myself, to start my studies. And I felt like I had won the lottery. Like, this poor little nobody from the wrong side of the tracks was actually going to become a physicist. I mean, imagine that!
It was the beginning of this brand-new, completely different life than I’d ever had before.
I was brought up in a strict, Spanish-speaking, Pentecostal household. My dad, both my grandfathers, were ministers. And, growing up, we went to church every single day. And the services were just long, drawn out, really raucous affairs. I remember everyone in the entire congregation, my mother included, jumping up and down and speaking in tongues.
But I was just completely devoted to science. Not church services, not what I thought were these ancient, supernatural beliefs. And, little by little, I just absorbed the scientific worldview, until it became my own. And by the time I graduated from UCLA, I belonged, body, mind, and soul, to the worlds of science and atheism. Which just seemed, you know, to go hand in hand.
So, when I left LA for Cornell, I was sad to say goodbye to my family and friends, of course, but I was even happier to leave behind the religion that I'd never really embraced. It was just so, so liberating!
And, I spent my days and nights either in class or in a dungeon-like lab. Just, like, Dr. Frankenstein, you know? I barely slept. Maybe three hours a night. I barely ate, and when I did, it was mostly just from vending machines. I was just, like, this skinny, unkempt, intense, uber-geek.
I had no social life. No friends, really. My family was thousands of miles away. But I was perfectly content. All I cared about, all I thought about, was science.
At first, I was super focused on just learning what the universe was actually made of. Like, what were its most fundamental elements? I was thinking, you know, when you magnify a digital photo, you see pixels, right? So, then, if you magnify the universe, push past its electrons, protons, all that stuff, if you keep magnifying and magnifying, what do you ultimately see? Pixels of matter? Pixels of energy? Pixels of spacetime? I was dying to find out.
One day, this group of astronomers, announced that galaxies aren't scattered randomly throughout the universe, like we always thought. But they form a pattern. Like a giant, magnificent, 3D work of art. And I was just, like, "Whoa!"
Where did *that* pattern come from? What did it even signify? Was it just an accident?
Suddenly, *those* were the deep questions I wanted to answer. But it meant switching from focusing on pixels, the smallest things in the universe, to focusing on galaxies, the *largest* things in the universe.
Changing your major in grad school is never easy, but I was determined to follow my own path.
Very quickly, I learned that galaxies rotate slowly, like giant merry-go-rounds. And, get this, they spin much faster than they *should*, like they're bloated with some kind of unseen material that makes them spin abnormally fast. They called it the "missing-mass problem."
Now, we call this hypothetical missing mass "dark matter." And more recently, we've discovered another oddity in the heavens: "dark energy." And get this, together, dark matter and dark energy make up 95 percent of the entire universe. 95 percent is invisible to us!
The missing-mass problem, now dark matter, it just blew my mind, rocked my reality, challenged my perception of *everything*. And I realized, you know, if I insisted that "seeing is believing," then I'd be turning a blind eye to 95 percent of what's out there. My worldview was just too narrow-minded for the cosmos.
It had to become big enough to include belief in what I couldn't see or prove. Like dark matter. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly continue calling myself a scientist.
As I dove into my investigation of galaxies, I quickly realized I needed to immerse myself in not one, not two, but three different fields: physics, astronomy, and mathematics.
I remember being so excited when I first learned about kinetic theory. It had always been used to describe the behavior of gases, but I struck on the idea of using it to explain the behavior of galaxies. And years later, after one of the most intense efforts of my life, I hit pay dirt. I discovered this really cool, mathematical explanation for why galaxies form a 3D pattern in deep space.
I'll never forget the day of my defense-of-thesis exam. The final hurdle before I could get my doctorate. I stood at the blackboard, facing professors from all three fields. And they could ask me anything they wanted, no matter how tough. And, boy, did they ever! It was grueling!
But I passed! I actually passed! And I'm not ashamed to admit, I just wept like a baby as my committee members congratulated me.
My dream had finally come true! I could not imagine being any happier!
But, of course, fate had other plans.