Where did Fred go to college?
May. 31st, 2004 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
indriIn "A Hole in the World" we see flashbacks of Fred leaving home for LA. She says she's leaving for the graduate physics program at UCLA and her parents' reaction indicates that she's not lived in Los Angeles before. Indeed, it's strongly suggested that she's been studying at a local university until this point.
But she has already studied under Seidel as an undergraduate. In "Supersymmetry", she says she was a history major until she attended one of his courses, after which she changed to physics. Seidel's office is clearly in LA by the time Fred is sent to Pylea, so this implies that she studied under him at another institution nearby before beginning graduate work with him in LA. He must have been offered a job in Los Angeles (or maybe he was in Texas as a visiting lecturer), and Fred followed.
I don't know where Fred first studied. I want her to have studied at the University of Texas at Austin, because then I could describe her life there with a fair degree of accuracy. I would have bought coffee at the same stall she would have gone to, toured the labs she would have worked in, waited aeons at the same elevators. And it's not impossible that she went there: it's a good school for a bright girl, with excellent history and physics courses, and it's far enough away from her parents that she'd have to live in Austin during the week but not so far that she couldn't visit them on the weekend (Austin is a ninety minute drive from San Antonio). But we have, AFAIK, no way of telling if she went there or to any of the other universities in east central Texas.
I should persuade the SO to watch "Supersymmetry" with me. I half-understand the physics references, but not enough to tell when Mutant Enemy start making it up. Ed Witten, for example, is name-dropped and that made me laugh, because he's a one-man industry and at one point the SO was studying his "Witten Complex". But I have no real idea who "Nomar Garciaparra and Sammy Sosa" are, except that I think they're probably sports stars. I know what a WIMP is and I wonder if the Klein of Kaluza-Klein is the bottle guy, but more than that I do not know. I think the SO would have a better chance of stripping the science from the pseudo-science because multi-dimensional geometry is his field: I stick with nice safe Euclidean space as much as I can.
Does anyone have any thoughts on what kind of job Fred's dad has/had? Fred's mother, if you recall, drove a bus and drove it well. Her parents strike me as intelligent but not over-educated: he'd maybe have a position of some responsibility that required smarts and superior common sense, but not a degree.
But she has already studied under Seidel as an undergraduate. In "Supersymmetry", she says she was a history major until she attended one of his courses, after which she changed to physics. Seidel's office is clearly in LA by the time Fred is sent to Pylea, so this implies that she studied under him at another institution nearby before beginning graduate work with him in LA. He must have been offered a job in Los Angeles (or maybe he was in Texas as a visiting lecturer), and Fred followed.
I don't know where Fred first studied. I want her to have studied at the University of Texas at Austin, because then I could describe her life there with a fair degree of accuracy. I would have bought coffee at the same stall she would have gone to, toured the labs she would have worked in, waited aeons at the same elevators. And it's not impossible that she went there: it's a good school for a bright girl, with excellent history and physics courses, and it's far enough away from her parents that she'd have to live in Austin during the week but not so far that she couldn't visit them on the weekend (Austin is a ninety minute drive from San Antonio). But we have, AFAIK, no way of telling if she went there or to any of the other universities in east central Texas.
I should persuade the SO to watch "Supersymmetry" with me. I half-understand the physics references, but not enough to tell when Mutant Enemy start making it up. Ed Witten, for example, is name-dropped and that made me laugh, because he's a one-man industry and at one point the SO was studying his "Witten Complex". But I have no real idea who "Nomar Garciaparra and Sammy Sosa" are, except that I think they're probably sports stars. I know what a WIMP is and I wonder if the Klein of Kaluza-Klein is the bottle guy, but more than that I do not know. I think the SO would have a better chance of stripping the science from the pseudo-science because multi-dimensional geometry is his field: I stick with nice safe Euclidean space as much as I can.
Does anyone have any thoughts on what kind of job Fred's dad has/had? Fred's mother, if you recall, drove a bus and drove it well. Her parents strike me as intelligent but not over-educated: he'd maybe have a position of some responsibility that required smarts and superior common sense, but not a degree.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-01 04:09 am (UTC)I take it that means they play baseball? :)
no subject
Date: 2004-06-01 05:53 am (UTC)