Welcome to another year of discovery and innovation! For me, the persona of the inventor, the tinkerer, and the explorer are all wrapped up into what it means to be a physicist. Relatively speaking, there aren’t that many of us, but we are all trained in such a way that problem solving is of utmost importance. What’s important is not necessarily the answer, but rather the way in which we think and reason and approximate to get a handle on the problem.

The world is a messy place, full of messy approximations and assumptions that we know are not true. Cows aren’t spherical, friction exists, and there is usually air resistance, yet we can send people to the moon and smash particles together at near the speed of light. Marie Curie and Richard Feynman are famous not only for being able to simplify some of the most complex concepts in physics, but also for their insights about the field and passion for discovery. For example, Feynman was among the best at finding conceptually simple ways of solving very complex problems, as his lectures illustrate.¹ Feynman diagrams are used to this day by theoretical physicists across many fields to represent complex mathematical expressions, even though they were originally a quantum electrodynamics calculation shorthand.²

Throughout your career, you’ll be asked to solve problems no one has ever solved before, make instruments from junk laying around the lab, or determine how to do something everyone says is impossible. Physicists don’t learn how to solve a set of problems, but how to try to understand a very complex world.

This is why I am proud to call myself a physicist well before any other label. And as a physicist, it is with great pride and a sense of duty that I chose to accept the position of director of the Society of Physics Students and Sigma Pi Sigma this summer.

SPS has been a part of my story since I first started college. For as long as I, or anyone else, can remember, I have wanted to be a scientist. Yet, I can honestly say that half of the reason I chose to stay in physics is my local SPS chapter at the Rochester Institute of Technology. As a first-year student, I was in a small department with only a handful of other physics majors. It was easy to feel lonely. I felt what anyone in my situation—unprepared, put to a great challenge without support—would have felt: that physics was somewhere between daunting and nearly impossible. I was frustrated and overwhelmed, and I felt as if I was the only person feeling this way. I felt like I wasn’t good enough and that I was just faking it. Then I went to my first SPS meeting and realized I wasn’t alone, that it was okay to be challenged, and that there were lots of other people just like me. I found my respite in a world full of unknowns and challenges. It was through a physics intramural soccer team called h-Bar (ħ), the bad physics movie nights, and the all-night GRE study sessions that I found my home. SPS also gave me back the sense of wonder and excitement that is nicely encapsulated by this quote of Richard Feynman: “I think I've got the right idea, to do crazy things—what other people would consider crazy things. There's so much fun to be had.”³

We are a small group, but there are amazing people in the physics community. Many of them are passionate and complex and wonderful in ways only physicists can be. It’s through the time spent in SPS clubs, interacting with the public at community outreach events, and talking to physicists of all ages that we make the connections that make us a community. For me, giving back to the community has made every late-night study session, last-minute homework epiphany, and every stressful final worth it. My only hope is that one day I’m able to give back more than I received.

And that’s part of the reason I wanted to introduce myself to you. I’m here at the SPS National Office to help each of you make SPS something special for you and for every physics and astronomy major. I stress the word help because there is no way I can do it alone. There is no way the team here at the SPS National Office can do it all. This organization is really yours and what you make it, and I ask you today to help your fellow physics enthusiasts. Tinker. Invent. Discover. Don’t do it alone. The only reason I’m here today is because people cared and helped me through those very tumultuous times. Please help me try to help every physics student.

There aren’t that many of us, but there sure is so much fun to be had.

Sincerely,

Brad R. Conrad, Ph.D.

Director of the Society of Physics Students and Sigma Pi Sigma

P.S. The other half of the reason, for those keeping track, was a tag-team effort of my professors, Anne Young and John Andersen. Without their friendship and fellowship, I wouldn’t be who I am today. //

1. R. Feynman, R. Leighton, and M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 3 volumes (1963 and 1965).

2. D. Kaiser, Physics and Feynman’s Diagrams, Am. Sci. 9, 156 (2005).

3. R. Feynman, No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman, p. 89 (W. W. Norton & Co., New York,1996).