Shawn Ryan

Like, I guess I'm lucky that I didn't take all of these advanced grad courses and just took a lot of E&M for, like, some of the stuff that my advisor happened to be doing was very, like, you know, you have a charge.

When it accelerates, it radiates.

Kind of like when you have an antenna, like, you're seeing, like, the radio signal from some charges moving up and down antenna.

So it was very easy math compared to a lot of stuff that people do in my field that I could latch on to and then think of some sort of fun little experiment.

Not real experiment, more like a thought experiment type of thing of how you'd measure angular momentum loss in a spiraling binary system, say.

So I have a fun result pretty early on in my career, but it's like...

It's a lot of luck that like, you know, if Andy's on the paper, then people care and people will write about it as spin memory effect or something versus it's like, so you get a little bit of like, that's cool.

I'm lucky in hindsight.

Very much love the kind of way that sometimes ideas can come together really quickly.

And then other times you're wasting a lot of time just being stuck.

So I'm lucky to have some good experience at the beginning of my grad program, but then I get hyped up in a silly way with this Einstein bullshit.

And then I'm like, uh-oh, because my family thinks it's awesome.

I mean, yes, when I was a kid, if I was going to be a physicist, wouldn't you want to be an amazing physicist?

Of course, that's the goal.

You go to Lindau, you go to these conferences where all these Nobel laureates get to hang out, and you're the students who get to meet them.

And you're like, this is the life.

I mean, maybe not exactly.

I think it's better if you earn the money and then you whatever.

But there is a lifestyle to just being good at your job would get you.

And it's like, I wish it were real.