During my senior year of high school, I decided to take the standard physics class offered at my school. Throughout the semester, my teacher made it clear that he was going to make my life more difficult by constantly answer problems and explain abstract concepts, because he thought I needed to be “held to a higher standard than the rest of the students”. Learning about gravity and having to draw free body diagrams were two things I particularly hated, but I was constantly being forced to try and work my way through these problems. Throughout the 18 week course, I was working tirelessly to try and maintain an A, because at the time I had been deferred from the University of Michigan, and getting a 4.0 the first semester of my senior year was my only hope of getting in at all. My teacher was oddly obsessed with the Nobel Prize winners in Physics, and he had a bunch of the previous winners photos and autographs framed and hanging in the back of his room. The only form of extra credit offered in his physics class was to get a new Nobel Prize winner in Physics to send you an autographed photo back, if you wrote to them. He promised a full 5% extra credit boost if we got a letter back. This being said, I wrote to one of the newest winners, Peter Higgs, of the University of Edinburgh, with little to no hope of a response. As the semester came to an end in January, I never got a response from Peter Higgs, and I ended with an 89%. I completely forgot I had written to Peter Higgs and about 10 other Nobel Prize winning physicists, until the middle of April when I received a letter from the University of Edinburgh. To my own surprise, Peter Higgs had sent me back his autographed photo, and it just so happened that he just had won the Nobel Prize in 2013, so when I showed my teacher, he was ecstatic. Not only did he give me the 5% after the semester ended, it was a huge “in your face” to him, having to give me the A I had worked so hard for. Here’s a link to the Nobel Prize of Physics winner Peter Higgs, he’s quite an interesting dude.
