Muhammad - My Story

An Inspirational Blog from Muhammad

I am 13 years old boy living in Lahore, Pakistan and studying in the 8th class. I have many interests, but I am very much passionate about science and just like every other boy I am curious about 'things'. I like to know about how things are made and how I can experiment with these things on my own. I strongly believe that curiosity driven by passion can enable me to succeed in many things, especially in science. 

Since childhood I used to ponder how things are made, why the universe behaves the way it does? What are the physics laws acting in our universe? Are we really alone in this vast universe? Why we have only three dimensions and what if we have many parallel universes. To quench my thirst for science I started watching science channels but to my disappointment our cable television had no good science channels, like discovery or national geographic. I searched on internet and finally started watching documentaries about science. Due to connection problems those videos used to take a lot of time to load so looking at my passion, my father once took me to a CD shop and there he helped me buy all the nice documentaries which I was yearning to buy. I started watching those documentaries which opened my eyes and I came to know about many interesting science facts. For me science became a way of thinking and much more and was the ultimate answer to my curiosity about our universe.

I started looking at the world differently. For me the sky is not blue because it is blue in color; sky looks blue because sunlight reaches Earth's atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered in all directions by the tiny molecules of air in the Earth's atmosphere. Blue is scattered more than other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.
What intrigued me was the beauty of this universe which is much more than meets the eye. The things around me suddenly have different new meanings. I know why black holes are made and what happened after the big bang. I have learned about the laws of universe, the laws that governs every known thing around, including us. I used to wonder why iron is attracted to a magnet, then later I found out this is because of a law of magnetism in which a magnet has a field of electrons and the electrons of the iron are in random positions. As they enter the field the electrons get aligned by the magnet which causes this attraction. For me my life suddenly has more meaning and all I need to do is to observe and learn and try to find out myself about the things which captivate my interests. So Internet and books became my best friends because I started using the internet to know more about the stuff I am interested in. My passion to do experiments led me do many small experiments on my own.

I wanted to explore more about science. I became interested in physics, chemistry and biology and maths because for me these branches can answer all my queries. The first I did was that I bought myself a very nice scientific calculator, which can help me calculate my problems because without maths we cannot prove any theory. The first thing I did was to calculate some constants, for example the mass of the sun, the distance to the earth and the sun, the amount of gravity acting upon me by the sun etc. To my surprise I found out that normal maths cannot solve some problems related to the universe. And for that I needed to learn calculus because Newtonian laws are not applicable on black holes, theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. After going deeper into the realm of physics I realized that physics is 98% maths and only 2% theory. So I turned my focus towards learning calculus. My inspirations are the people who invented calculus and who thousands of years ago found out universal constants without the use of calculator and internet. So I said to myself, if they could learn so can I. So I started learning calculus on my own, through various means.

Now I can proudly say that I have learned the basics of calculus and am moving towards learning single variable and later multi-variable. I want to inspire many young students who have fear of maths. That fear is instilled so much in them that they think maths is the most boring and dry subject. But I want to tell them that everything needs math and they should not be afraid to try it. Trying is the first step in the right direction but failing is not the last step. We all learn from our mistakes and it is part of our learning.

I started thinking how I can inspire people at a smaller scale. So I started with my own neighborhood and made a small group of students who were willing to try and learn. I started helping those who were weak in math and told them that without trying you will not be able to learn. I learned we do not need to start from a bigger level, if we can help some people around us it is also an achievement and anyone can inspire people regardless of their age. All we need to do is to look around in our surroundings for people in need for help.

Thanks Muhammad, for such a brilliant, inspirational blog article! Truly awesome ... and just 13 years old!

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