The Seaside Physics Juxtaposition

I grew up in an English seaside town. Dirty yellow boots, stinking scampi and tourists, lots and lots of tourists. I lived there until I was eighteen. Right now, I've found myself back in that seaside town where my physics cranium started. It's odd to look back and wonder why I got into physics. I'd like to say something elegantly epic like:

 "[I] wanted to be part of the romantic, exciting adventure to tease apart [the universe's] mysteries", 

as on Michio Kaku's website. But the truth is that that's a load of garbage. It's something that this seaside town nurtured overtime. This seaside town of Whitby, North Yorkshire.

A Physics Motivation

Some physicists would agree that their motivation for doing physics came when they were aged 16 to 18. For a lot of people in the UK, that's when they are studying their A levels. I did my A levels in Whitby, and it's true that they did play a major part in my motivation. But an interesting note is that A level is optional, so you need to like physics to choose physics to study physics. So what happened to me? What made me like physics enough to choose physics to study physics? Well, physics is everywhere. No matter where you look, some event takes place that involves physics. I think it's a possibility that I was tuning into seaside physics as an inspiration.

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Seaside Physics

The seaside is a non-stop physics puzzle.  Looking around at the tourists, I doubt many of them consider the collection of physics they are visiting.  If they were slow down for a moment, put their map book away, I'm sure they could be found staring with glazed eyes. It's my most used expression. The expression that I use when I'm trying to figure something out. These are some of the seaside physics that have given me, and still give me, that glazed eye expression:

• Do different flavours of ice cream melt at different rates?
• At which point would we consider a wave to start?
• Why do waves come above water and erupt in a frothy, foamy explosion?
• What made the cliff fall down, exposing old graves from St Mary's church?
• What's the point when sand stops being too dry or too wet to be made into a decent sandcastle?
• What's the best way to put a flag on a sandcastle without destroying the castle?
• Why is it more windy at the seaside than inland?
• How much altitude could that seagull have gained when it kicked my head? (Honestly, that happened a few days ago.)

...and that's not the end, there are more, lots and lots more, most of which remain unanswered. By applying theories of physics, there are lots of potential answers but rarely a firm conclusion. So despite being sure that the seaside has had some involvement, the reason I chose to do physics is, well, it's complicated.

That bit at the end...

Michio Kaku's website - why he became a physicist:
http://mkaku.org/home/?page_id=256