Horgan Seminar Blog

              The Ghost of Mental Illness by Ashton Hummler Do you believe in ghosts…? Spirits that roam the earth because they have unfinished business with the land of the living… What if I told you they were all around us, nearly everywhere you go, an apparition may be there lurking. Do you ever walk outside in a crowded area and feel a cold breeze blow almost through you? Or crawling on your skin, like that of a spider you could’ve sworn was on your leg… but when you look it was just your imagination. You can never be too vigilant, the last thing you’d want is to get caught off guard by a threat you can’t see… since your eyes are reading this, now would be a great time to strike! BOO!  Ghosts are everywhere. I use the metaphor of ghost to represent someone with depression, as well as depression itself. Depression can be difficult to detect, fill people with dread, and some people don’t even believe that it’...

 Is Athletics Really a Mind Game?     -Dylan Maund                Mental health in athletics can be summarized from a footballing legend, Adrea Pirlo, where he argues that “Football is played with the head. Your feet are just the tools.”   For those unaware, Pirlo is well renowned in football, known as soccer for most Americans, for his creativity and amazing accuracy in passing and dominated the middle of the pitch (field) despite his smaller stature in some of the most competitive competitions like the champions league and the World cup. To one of the world's best, football is a game of the mind. This highlights the importance of a strong and confident mind when you are trying to perform at your best.  Self confidence is the crux to maintaining one's mental health. Confidence in your preparations and that you will be able to perform to your abilities. These two types of confidence are key to maintaining an ...

Armen Berenson HST - 401 Professor John Horgan February 28, 2023

       Albert Einstein asked if god created the universe on purpose or not. I ask, is god even aware of their role in the creation of the universe? Not understanding theoretical physics doesn't give me anxiety. People who don't understand themselves, however, do. According to  Robbert Dijkgraaf , a contributing columnist to Quanta Magazine, physics aims to understand in a precise, mathematical way all manifestations of matter and energy in the universe. I was never good enough at math to follow the dream of understanding physics well enough to understand myself. I resent math as a device we created ourselves to explain the universe. It has no words and conveys no feeling, to me, this is not a holistic enough approach to understanding. My curious self, however, couldn't exist without some understanding, so I looked for other ways to understand the universe's manifestation of matter and energy. How I came to my own understanding, I cannot entirely recall, but one ...

                                                                        The Heat Death of My Bedroom By Saoirse Mooney  “We're all hurtling towards death. Yet here we are, for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we're going to die. Each of us secretly believing we won't.” ― Charlie Kaufman In my junior year of high school, I had the choice of taking physics or chemistry. Obviously I chose physics: it seemed like it had all the answers, the real answers to those questions I often wondered about the universe. And it certainly didn’t help that the chemistry teacher had a reputation for throwing dry erase markers at students. Ultimately, the physical class progressed as a physics class would. We didn’t get to much discussion on the multiverse or aliens, (I did, however,...

          While physics provides many answers to our universe, there is much that cannot be fully explained through mathematical equations. For this reason, the top physicists and important figures in the field have varying theories to “The Answer” to the universe. To some physicists, “The Answer” is an overarching theoretical equation that could solve the complex questions of the universe like supermembranes and super 5-branes. This version of “The Answer” is more recently known as “M-theory”. M-theory is a continuation of string theory and is an attempt to relate and connect the quantum aspect of physics with gravity. The goal is to be able to explain quantum effects and gravity and the relationship between the two similar to electricity and magnetism. M–theory would is thought to be the poetic “Answer” to the universe since it would connect the two fundamental forces in theoretical physics. To others, “The Answer” is an explanation of how the universe wi...

Armen Berenson HST-401 Professor John Horgan February 7, 2023 This image was created with the assistance of DALL·E 2                                                     Helping Physicists Off of Their High Horse In 2010, world-renowned theoretical physicist, Steven Hawking, claimed publicly that scientists, rather than philosophers, “have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge,” and that “Philosophy is dead.” ( Warman ). This punch was neither the first nor the last to cross the barrier between these two great fields. In 2014, during an interview with HuffPost, public figure of the science community Neil deGrasse Tyson flagrantly belittled philosophy as a whole, calling it laughable, a “useless enterprise”, and serving only to delay progression ( Pigliucci ).  It hurts me to hear h...

  Polymath : “a person of various learning who has learned and knows much” By Gianangelo Dichio Image created on OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 Image generating software with prompt, “a drawing of a human with knowledge sprouting like a tree out of their brain with math equations in the background” The polymath, commonly referred to as “Rennaissance Man” or “Universal Man,” was coined by the Greeks to describe Philosopher Plato as a human with deep knowledge in different fields. The idea of the polymath, although coined at the time of Plato, has existed for a long time, in fact, there have always been humans with great knowledge. But a polymath is not only defined by great knowledge —  a polymath has the ability to easily learn new subjects by applying their learning and skills from past subjects to new ones. This is done by finding the parallels in different fields and establishing links between the topics. So are polymaths just generalists who know a little about everything? Not necessar...

  Richael Lamendola  Professor Horgan  HST 401  8 February 2023  The Disease Amongst Doctors In recent years, the main pandemic on the minds of the public is the notorious COVID-19, but perhaps there is an even deadlier plague on the rise: physician burnout.  When we enter our doctor’s office, it is natural to assume that we are in the hands of the most capable people; in fact, in a study conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, it was reported that 84% of the general public have trust in their doctors. But what would happen to this trust if the public was informed that their physician was unhappy with their job, overworked, inattentive, and unmotivated? Would this change the population’s confidence in doctors? Physician burnout is generally categorized by three main symptoms: exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of efficacy. Exhaustion from physician burnout is far different from grogginess during work hours or taking an extra ten minutes t...