I'm pretty darned lucky I think. :) I get a periodic fix of ideas and opinions and exposure to the workings of the minds of true scientists all in the comfort of my own home. Every now and then, (on a Sunday, usually) when my two physicist uncle-and-aunt tandem come to town for business (in the natural sciences sense of the term) I sit at our dinner table or, if you will, our very own round table of great thinkers, my idols, my family. Two physicists, a chemist, an economist, a physician (all of which are doctors by the way,) and me. And no it's not always science we talk about. And it's not the science that always leaves this flame ablaze in me even days after such a Sunday family dinner.

It's the ideas. Sharing the insights on the American, Japanese, German techniques in education. Why Japan's Nobel laureates can be counted with one hand, while for Germany and the US the number is ahead by leaps and bounds. One must strike a balance between discipline and creativity. We Filipinos have the creativity, but we are drained by our lack of discipline. The Japanese have all the training, skill and discipline, but they are taught not to take risks, their creativity is constrained. How all the fields of knowledge are now becoming so much more interconnected, looping back to the Enlightenment when philosophers discussed mathematics, mathematicians fathered economics, and scientists and philosophers were one and the same.

It's the histories that are breached. Kepler and quest for God in the ellipsis during the 30 years war. Einstein and his theories in the middle of the first world war and how a hundred scientists (Nobel Prize winning, some of them) signed against his discoveries. Jewish science, they said, is junk science. We never read these things in our Physics textbooks. But my family, being the scientists that they are, they are immersed in the history of their discipline (plus, in a splendid stroke of luck, they have a knack for story telling). And it fascinates me beyond words how these names: Tyco Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Andrew Wiles, Max Planck, their personalities come to life when they are spoken of in my humble round table. The poetic Kepler who wrote for his own epitaph: "I measured the heavens, now the shadows I measure. Sky bound is the mind, earth bound the body rests." Brahe with his selfish nature, obedient data collection and golden nose. Every time, names I perceived as flat personalities in the bowels of history, and which I associate only with a theorem or a concept or a hypothesis, they become real people with their very own characteristics, personalities, their flaws, and their achievements. Every single time in that small round table.

It's the passion for their work that I see in the way they tell their tales. My aunt and uncle are first and foremost Physicists. But they too are educators, and the spirit of knowledge in them burns into me when I listen to them. In my eyes it's hard work and lots of fun for them all in one caboodle. They love what they're doing because in little increments they see the hard-earned fruits of their labor (in their students, in their school, in their research, etc.), and at the same time they're doing so much (if at the moment unperceived) for such an unappreciative and myopic country. Tell me, how many people can say they have attained these two things in their life? I may never even get to do any one of those in my lifetime. And much like Odysseus in the movie Troy, I feel pretty damn blessed just to have eaten from the same Yellow Cab pizza as a few of those who have.

Today was my graduation day, but the highlight of my day wasn't getting that medal, it was talking to them: Uncle Chris, Auntie Marivic, my mom and dad, and Auntie Cora. I want so much to be like them. It doesn't matter that I won't earn as much as so many many others in my graduating class. It doesn't matter if I won't get to work in an multinational company like my college mates. I want to be a scientist. I want to publish papers. I want to stay in my country and teach. I want to be like them.

I wonder what I did to deserve having the people I most look up to an arms length away. Having them talk with me around the dinner table about things they are paid to do at conferences and conventions. My family so rich with valuable ideas flowing so freely over our desert that I feel almost guilty that I don't have a notebook to store them all in. Guilty too that I am benefiting too much from an externality without being able to afford it.

If I could be as great as they are, if I could take it all in and get to at least half of the heights they've achieved, then maybe I could become somebody enough to deserve the right and privilege to pass this passion on to my children, planting in them the same desire that is being imprinted into my character.