My first research advisor ever.

This is way back when I was an undergraduate at California Polytechnic State University or Cal Poly, if you're cool.

This is back in the early 2000s.

My advisor was Dr.

Seneffamy Tanaka.

He was an expert in relativity.

In general relativity, special relativity, he taught courses on the subjects.

His own research was based in relativity.

And relativists are not as common as you might think, but he was, he was one of

them. He was an expert in general relativity. And one day I remember in class, it was a class

on general relativity. And he's talking to the class. And, you know, when you, when you can get

a professor going on some little side tangent, especially about their lives, they always take you up on the offer, and they start reminiscing.

And I remember him distinctly making an offhand comment about the career options for scientists, for physicists, and then especially specialists like him in relativity, relativists.

And he said, if you want to be a relativist, all you get to do is make templates.

Templates, templates, templates, just a bunch of templates.

It's so boring.

I went on to do a project with him that had nothing at all to do with templates. And if you're curious, it was calculating Kazimir forces for flat universes with different topologies. But the paper is on my website, if you're interested in. But to get at what Dr. Tanaka was talking about, we need to set the clock back another 100 years.

We need to talk about Einstein and the discovery of gravitational waves.

First off, the equations of general relativity are hard.

And not just, oh, physics is hard, hard, for physicists, general relativity is hard.

General relativity, this is our understanding of gravity.

It's so easy to say that, oh, if you have mass or energy, you distort space time around you.

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