Introducing myself and my search for knowledge!

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:

1. The Cosmos
2. Consciousness
3. SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
4. Physics of the Universe
5. Math
6. FPV (First Person View) drone building and flying
7. 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.