Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

Sean Boocock works with Dr. Freericks to translate data into graphical form. (Photo: Roland Dimaya)

By LiAnna Davis

Georgetown senior Sean Boocock embraces the interdisciplinary opportunities available within a liberal arts education. A double major in Physics and Math, Boocock is also pursuing a minor in English and looks for ways to incorporate his fascination with philosophy and theology into all of his course work, including his research work with Dr. Jim Freericks.

Boocock first met Dr. Freericks when he took Introduction to Relativity in his sophomore year. Boocock found Dr. Freericks’ teaching style complementary to his learning style and enjoyed working with him in the course of the class. Boocock began assisting Dr. Freericks in his research the next semester. Boocock’s work involved visualizing the response to high electric fields of nanoscale electrical components (metals) and creating graphics for Dr. Freericks’ recently published book, Transport in Multilayered Nanostructures. Boocock also had the opportunity to use an open-source software called ParaView to analyze large data sets.

“Interpreting the data as it had been exported and then getting it into a form that could be subsequently used to make images and animations in ParaView was a significant challenge,” Boocock explains. “It involved a lot of coding, trial and error, and debugging time to perfect. Working with data sets that sometimes reached multiple gigabytes of seemingly random numbers gave me an appreciation for the types of visuals that we are so accustomed to seeing in publications and in the media. These are not simple to produce; they require extensive manipulation and time, sometimes more than the actual generation of the data itself.”

Although the work is highly complex and the debugging process can be time consuming, Boocock says his favorite part of the work is the “aha” moment when he figures something out: “After spending hours and hours trying to get a piece of code to work, the satisfaction one feels when it finally does work is hard to describe.”

Now in his final year at Georgetown, Boocock’s next step is working on his senior thesis with Dr. Freericks, which will be a project on the models of ion traps used in possible quantum computers. After Georgetown, Boocock plans to attend graduate school. Though his initial plan was to pursue studies in high-energy particle physics, he recently discovered programs in the philosophy of physics, which, he says, are more in line with his love of intersecting disciplines. While academia is a strong potential career path, Boocock says that he can also see himself as an author or a science journalist, or maybe as the owner of a vegan restaurant serving traditional and Ethiopian-inspired dishes of local, in-season vegetables and legumes.

Vegan cooking is one of Boocock’s extracurricular passions, and it is one that indirectly sustains his other favorite pastime: running marathons. Boocock is also involved in organizing a community service program for HOPE on campus.

Despite all of his commitments, Boocock is able to maintain a high academic standard. A dean’s list regular, he is also a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Sigma Nu and has received several prestigious scholarships. In his pittance of free time, he also enjoys contemplating the philosophy of science.

“Reading about physics in popular histories and even textbooks, the proven complexity of the progression from original idea to hypothesis to realization is smoothed over and reduced to a clear path along which a scientist walked inevitably toward the final theory. In reality, it doesn’t work like that. Einstein may have been one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, but he too struggled with a theory, the general theory of relativity, before finally publishing his results (only later to call a key aspect of the theory, the cosmological constant, his greatest blunder),” Boocock says. “It is this reality that my research with Dr. Freericks has exposed me to and prepared me for in the future.”

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