The Slightly Disgruntled Scientist

A couple of months ago (December 2012), I resigned from the Australian Democrats.

People who met me and found out I was actively involved in the party, would always — and I mean always — open with the same question: why the Democrats? And the answer is not so much to do with the party as it is to do with me.

I don't like being a whinger when it comes to politics. Okay, correction: I don't like being just a whinger. I want to be doing something to fix the things I rant about. I don't think that anyone, any voter, is simply entitled to have their political representation magically appear out of the ether, with all of the policies and platforms that they want to see enacted. If you want those policies to be enacted, or those politicians to exist, you have to work for it. You have to support them, and compromise for them, and carry heavy shit around for them. Not everyone has the privilege of being able to do that, but I certainly do, and I wouldn't feel good about wasting the opportunities I have.

I thought the Democrats would be the ideal way for me to participate in Australian politics because I broadly agreed with their policies and principles, and I saw how I could contribute to the party. But I was wrong.

If you're expecting to read some sordid, tell-all, self-serving tale of what happened over the last few months, you won't find it here. There are still some viable, promising candidates in the party, and I don't want to undermine either of them.

I will, however, continue to extend the offer I made to members before I resigned: you may ask me in good faith about anything I've said or done, or about anything said about me; I will answer, and I will provide evidence for everything I say. (Here's a rough guide to what I mean by good faith: framing a question around a clearly absurd or defamatory claim that you've taken at face value does not qualify.)

The best thing about my time in the party was working with some of the most amazing, enthusiastic, productive and effective activists I have ever met. These people would come up with idea after idea, they would follow through on the best ones, and they would move on to the next plan before the echoes died away. I sincerely hope that I will get to work with those people again.

For a few years before escaping the extraordinary gravitational pull of my university, I served as a tutor and lab demonstrator for some first year physics units. From time to time I would find myself reliving the same argument with yet another student, over and over again — an argument that would inevitably start with this:

Will we ever use relativity/quantum physics/particle physics? Why learn it?

There are many ways to answer this question. One could make a grand speech about the value of learning things that aren't obviously useful, or claim that our innate curiosity should be fed with a range of intellectual foodstuffs, or talk to the fact that university is all about learning bizarre and wonderful things. But... well, these are all a little bit patronising and a far too general. There are plenty of not-obviously-useful things to learn, some of which really aren't useful to learn, ever. Morse code, for example. Repair techniques for the fire-lance. How to maintain a MySpace page. Latin. What makes particle physics different from these things?

I wrote this in 2005, whilst doing my physics honours project. For me, this involved 60–80 hours per week of experimental work — sitting for hours in front of a magnetometry rig, electron microscope, and for a few days there, a nuclear research reactor. My lab was in the basement, so I would go for days at a time without ever seeing the Sun.

After a while you go a little funny.

So the other day I’m doing electron microscopy on a sample of nanoparticles. I do all the alignments and calibrations and select an area to start taking images from, pretty much at random. The first thing I see is:

Now I’ll be the first to claim that staring at a green phosphor or LCD screen for hours on end is not the best thing for one’s sanity, but the first thing I noticed was the pattern of particles in the area shown below…

Over the last few years I have insisted on doing the conscientious thing with electronic waste — refusing to discard it with the other household rubbish, keeping it instead for recycling at our local tip. Of course, the rather predictable result of this was that we accumulated boxes upon boxes of batteries, compact fluorescent bulbs, dead mobile phones, old televisions and computers, and the occasional piece of old scientific equipment.

We finally got around to getting rid of it all yesterday, and amongst the pieces of useless garbage were two things I found difficult to part with.

I've been involved with political parties of one kind or another for almost ten years now — on and off, as my sanity ran out or was replenished. To help those who might be thinking of making a foray into the world of politics, I've made this handy chart.