For someone whose natural tendency is to help other people, pursuing a topic for the selfish reason of “because it's interesting to me” has been difficult for me. Since November 2005 when I first tried to answer the “broader impacts” question in an essay and couldn't even convince myself, I've been holding internal debates.

Exploration and understanding of the Universe around us seems to be the primary answer. The sense of curiosity and desire to understand the world around us are human characteristics that transcend time and culture. A phenomenon as cool as gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic explosions in the Universe and a mystery to this day, is worthy of such passionate interest.

Studying GRBs also helps us understand physics closer to home. Outflow of material, for example, occurs in huge jets in space as well as your kitchen faucet (although your faucet will never reach relativistic speeds). Shock waves are observed in space and heard by us as fast-moving aircraft fly overhead. X-ray and gamma-ray detectors are used in hospitals and dentists' offices, airport metal detectors, and space observatories. Methods of calculating and using statistics are used every day, by astrophysicists and other scientists, financial consultants, safety analysists, marketing firms, and political pollsters.

More interesting to physicists in other areas, GRBs have been related to fireballs, supernovae, black holes, neutron stars, galaxies, clusters, neutrinos, magnetohydrodynamics, cosmology, dark energy, quantum gravity, and much more, all within the past few months. Researching “interdisciplinary” physics helps both fields in furthering discovery.

There are other reasons as to why studying GRBs is important to me, the scientific community, and the people of the world, but I have yet to be able to put them into words. I have only just begun my journey of learning. Others have written hundreds of papers and whole books about the wonders of GRBs and other unexplained cosmological happenings in our Universe. I write this entry in my blog.