The World of Ideas

Last night I went to the monthly meeting fo the Arizona Geological Society. The talk was about the Enlightenment and how it helped kick off geology as it's own branch of science. Something like that, anyway. The speaker, Vic Baker or the University of Arizona, is an engaging speaker, and that surely helped draw me in. But what really grabbed me was the deeper, more romantic notion of ideas and their evolution over the 18th and 19th centuries. I came out of it with a book recommendation (The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf) and a desire to abandon Twitter and as the kids say, read all the things.

It was the first time in a few years that I've been to a geology talk like this, a talk where somebody gets up and speaks for an hour about a series of disparate ideas that come together to make a larger story. I realized last night how much I have missed that.

For most of the past twenty years I wanted to teach. That was a driving force behind my sticking with my PhD program, despite struggling through writing while working full time through the last five years of it. I wanted to get a tenure-track job working at a school with an MS program, and maybe a bit more of a teaching load than most people like.

This struck me as the best way to keep myself surrounded by ideas, and the idea of ideas, if that makes sense. I always found teaching the most rewarding part of my many years as a graduate student. It was always a pleasure helping others find their way through difficult subjects (and the not so difficult ones, too). When I wasn't teaching, I'd be expanding humanity's understanding of some esoteric bit of the earth. Judging from what I see on Twitter, most of the hard work of pushing the boundaries of science consists of writing proposals. Still, it sounded like a good deal.

The academic track didn't work out for me, so I spend most of my time in the world of production and results, pushing the bounds of block models and drill results. It's fulfilling work, but it isn't my passion. It isn't reading and thinking and writing, generating raw ideas, floating in the ether.

That's what this blog is about. It's encouragement to have new ideas in the of geology and revisit old ones. It's an opportunity for me to take trips into the world of ideas and spend a bit more time there, writing up a short report about what I found. I don't get to spend my life getting lost on the side roads in this world. But I'm glad I get a chance to visit and bring you along.