Dark Matter, Dark Night

I basically pulled an all-nighter last night finishing up the project that was due today. I fell asleep at 7:30 AM, hoping to wake up at 8:15 AM and finish my blog. That clearly didn't happen so I couldn't get to my blog until right now, unfortunately. I thought I would have time in class since we were only doing project presentations, but that also didn't work out.

So let's go back to the morning of yesterday. Lindsay and I woke up disappointed because we had overslept by a couple of hours again. Luckily, we had the whole day to work on our project, so that would be helpful. Sadly, I hadn't charged my camera the night before so I couldn't take pictures during the day. 

In class, we had a guest speaker, Gourav Khullar who was a grad student at Cambridge. His

I may have stalked Gourav and found a picture
 because I forgot to take one with him

presentation was packed with a lot of information, but the best part about him was how humble he was. One of the students kept constantly interrupting him, claiming Gourav's statements were incorrect. Gourav would then coolly give an explanation on why he was correct, without being rude, and kindly saying that he saw the others' perspective.

We then had more time to work on our project, and I was still looking things up on dark matter. I was scrolling through Vera Rubin's papers and found an interesting equation on mass and decided to completely change my project. Fortunately, and also unfortunately, I hadn't started before since everything was running a little late from the pile of make up work I had earlier. My question was now going to be "How much mass does dark matter take up in Andromeda?" I asked Ms.Ramseyer excitedly if this was an option for a project and she just looked at me, saying, "Oh no..."Later that night, I found out why she said that, but it was too late. I was too deep into the project.

After an hour later, we all went to a library that had a special collection of old physics books that we could flip through. One of the books was written in by Galileo Galilei himself, and we were touching it. Another was a notebook of Chandrashekhar. It had his notes and calculations as he was discovering formulas and proofs.

Mr.DeCoster and Ms.Ramseyer stayed an hour and a half helping us all. They were literally like gods. There are very VERY few teachers who put in this much extra time to help their students, and I am so thankful that they did.

Me reading Vera Rubin's pape

After getting home, I kept working on the project. It turned out to be a lot harder than I thought and finding the numbers and correct equations was becoming extremely difficult. There was no proper way to check if I was doing anything right because the answer to my project's question couldn't exactly be found online. Neither could I find information on the equation I was using since it was rarely used by students. At the end, I got as closest as I possibly could to what seemed like a reasonable answer. I started my write-up around 1:00 AM, and finished around 5:00 AM, so I could begin making the PPT.

Even though it was a hard feat staying up almost all night, and required some very loud music being played in my earbuds to wake myself up, I had a lot of fun along the way. It was a quite difficult project and involved some very precise unit conversions and LOTS of trial and error. But the overall process of getting to the solution was actually a wild adventure, and as it's always said, it's the path itself that's always what matters.