My name is Norman, I'm from Aachen, Germany, living in California since 2008. As of June 2017, I’m 37 years old. I'm a mechanical engineer working for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I love the cool projects we are working on and thereby adding to human knowledge. My wife @jmetz013 is the reason I moved to the US. We met in 2007 when I was doing an internship in Santa Barbara while she was going to UCSB. I would like to mention at this point that I kissed her first.
I used to travel a lot. I took the Transsibirian Railway from Moscow to Mongolia and Beijing, then traveled through China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and ending up in Thailand. I never felt that free in my life. I also went to India hoping to gain spiritual wisdom but noticed I’m just a self-centered asshole like the protagonist from “Are You Experienced?” by William Sutcliffe.
The biggest mind shift that I had in my life was when I read “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking. I found the book in the library after asking my chemistry something that I don’t exactly remember after which she told me that this was a philosophical question. Since that time, I have never stopped wondering about our Universe and the Cosmos.
I plan on posting about my many interests which I list below sorted by importance:
- The Cosmos
- Consciousness
- SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
- Physics of the Universe
- Math
- FPV (First Person View) drone building and flying
- My Vespa PX200 scooter
I have many more interests, such as artificial intelligence, economics, cryptocurrencies, meditation, running, skiing, cars, etc. but I don’t think that I have anything valuable to contribute to these topics, at least at this time.
My display name is a reference to the Euler’s Formula:
e^i*pi + 1 = 0
I’m not an expert at math, but I certainly do appreciate it. I think math tells us about us humans and how we think things are, which might totally not be how things really are.