Perpetual motion is impossible. We currently know it cannot be achieved since it violates both the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Despite this, I wanted to make a magnet-powered car for my eighth-grade passion project — essentially, the repulsion or attraction of the two magnets would allow the car to continuously move forward and backward. While I was not able to complete my vision, that being because I had to hold and guide one magnet as the other remained statically attached to the cart, the rabbit hole in which I fell down has guided me through my high school career and life plans. 

I didn’t find a passion for physics until a little while later. It was my sophomore year of high school, and I was sitting in my first-period English class. I noticed a book in my teacher’s library, Richard Feynman’s The Feynman Lectures on Physics. So I, of course, had to ask my teacher if I could borrow it. I had heard, watched, and read about Feynman since I had originally gotten caught up in my eighth-grade passion project, but having the book allowed me to continue to find my passion for the subject. I read endlessly — during math class, at family gatherings, and in the car. I darted straight to my school’s media center once I finished that book. I picked up everything I could find: VOID - The Strange Physics of Nothing, The History of Physics, and 7 Brief Lessons on Physics. The more I read, the more the subject intrigued me — gravitational potential, theory of special and general relativity, quantum mechanics; every new topic made me want to learn more. However, it wasn’t just physics; the concept that there were many other subjects that I knew so little about intrigued me. After all, Feynman did say, “The greatest joy in life is the pleasure of finding things out.” 

From that point on, all the decisions I’ve made, whether that be making my schedule or applying to summer programs, have been to further my passion for learning. For me, that looks like loading up my schedule with the hardest classes — learning Coulomb’s Law, Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution curves, JavaScript, elasticity in terms of economics, and how to properly appeal to my audience using ethos, logos, or pathos. All while my classmates have taken the easy way out, having two free periods or only taking core classes. It looks like reading nonfiction book after nonfiction book fills my brain with all the information I can possibly remember; it looks like asking my teachers questions to further my understanding of the subject. While many may “never wander” to this point of their academic career, I felt in order to “live deliberately,” to have a purpose, I had to do this. I had to continue to learn. 

Henry David Thoreau wrote “Walden” on the basis of stepping away from a materialistic society. His journey to Walden Pond was meant to contemplate the meaning of life and find a man’s role in it. I’ve lived off the idea that “we are earnest to explore and learn all things” and “we require all things be mysterious.” My Walden Pond, my “inexhaustible vigor,” will always be at my desk, learning something new; that being anything as simple as the views of political figures or as complex as taking the integral of a function. The “vast Titanic features” in Massachusetts that Thoreau witnessed, are my thousand-page physics textbooks or 20-minute-long calculus YouTube videos I watch for fun.

Though I had not been able to disprove the laws of thermodynamics in the eighth grade, I had found a passion that would carry with me for the next three years — learning. Since then, while friends and classmates go out on Friday nights, I stay home studying for the SAT, reading reports the Federal Reserve published, or reading articles published by a number of different

science professors. My purpose in life is to continue exploring and learning. To continue reading an endless amount of physics books. To continue staying up until three in the morning watching That Organic Chemistry Tutor go over the basics of Calculus. And maybe by doing so, I will be able to prove Julius Mayer and James Joule wrong and make a perpetual motion car.