- I felt a sense of holiness when revisiting my notes about “malama aina,” and excitement when reviewing notes from the soft living matter meeting. I know what I want: the place-based rightness of malama and the question-pattern-chain rightness of biophysics institutions. I wish these worlds could communicate better—the latter has substantial funding that could be directed toward community technologies like centrifuges and bacterial remedies rather than nuclear-powered AI. Physical sciences often overlook crucial bodily contexts when developing drugs, or fail to consider all factors in innovations like GMO golden rice. Studying the physics of living systems requires more than just physics—it needs the wisdom of kupuna who recognize thousands of natural signs, from bird routes to dolphin nesting locations to wave cycles. These are both facts and ways of knowing that one-sided hypotheses might miss. This internal conflict might be the source of my alternating sleeplessness and sleepiness, my dread and hope. Sohit encouraged me to pursue this integration, reminding me that even though research requires basic capital production, the scientific community internally values interest-guided exploration and genuine curiosity. The key is following through with rigorous study to ground these explorations.
- the vital question: the dot product of place-based and statmech-style inquiry
- examples: