My dream is simple: to make a simple theoretical calculation and have my prediction experimentally tested within my lifetime. I am in constant awe of our universe -- how its clockwork is set to the tune of symbols that I can write down with my pen; how a precious few laws determine its past, present, or future; and how seemingly disparate physical phenomena are the consequences of the same machinery. Time and time again, I have been left awestruck and dumbfounded by the awesome creativity of the universe -- from the wonders of Special Relativity to the famous counterintuitive effects of Quantum Mechanics. I have a demonstrated track record of proposing ideas, executing necessary calculations, and publishing the results in a paper – all independently. I have pursued this at the City College of New York (CCNY) by independently solving variations of famous problems such as the Brachistochrone Problem and the Moving Mirrors problem. I also have experience working in collaborations, as evidenced by my two years of modeling exoplanets with Dr. Amit Levi, longtime research scientist at the Harvard Center for Astronomy (CfA) and current Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at The Braude College of Engineering in Israel. I also thrive in a lab setting, as demonstrated by my work in creating 2D Convolutional Neural Networks at the Meriles Lab at City College. This wide breadth of research has endowed me with a rich collection of problem-solving approaches which I am excited to employ on new problems. A single thread binds together my entire research portfolio: light. In fact, I became fascinated with the Action Principle when I first entered CCNY. I ultimately created a dynamical rescaling algorithm that numerically solved the generalized Brachistochrone problem by iterative application of Snell’s Law to a heterogeneous medium. My solution was published in the peer-reviewed journal The Physics Teacher (https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0053475), a journal that emphasizes a pedagogical approach to original research. This experience was a turning point: it demonstrated that I could create my own original idea, engineer the algorithms necessary to validate my idea and write the results into a LaTeX-ed paper (not to mention undergo the entire peer-review process) – all completely independently, without the aid or mentorship of any professor. I gave a talk at the 242nd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, presenting my results on the generalized Brachistochrone problem (AAS242 #331.03). After this wonderful experience, my fascination with light took me somewhere quite unexpected: a condensed matter research lab. Prof. Carlos Meriles is a condensed matter experimentalist who runs photonics experiments at CCNY, leveraging Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) impurities in diamonds with the ultimate goal of creating a quantum computer. At the time, I sought an experience that combined my fascination about light with the chance to work in a lab setting. Prof. Meriles’ Lab provided exactly such an opportunity: I worked under Dr. Fernando Meneses, a postdoc who guided me through applying Artificial Intelligence to discern light-matter interactions. Specifically, my goal was to denoise the lab’s images of NV centers. To this end, I created a series of 2D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), trained on my Monte Carlo simulations of Telegraph and Brownian noise. I trained the CNNs to detect the magnitude of each noise using the FFT (fast Fourier transform) and PSD (power spectral density) of an arbitrary superposition of the two noise profiles. The lab used my networks to reconstruct the PSD of a variable magnetic field, which appeared in a paper published in the Physical Review Applied. After eight months at the Meriles Lab, I sought a new challenge: Astrophysics – a field where light is the key to the universe. There was just one problem: CCNY had no astronomy faculty. I thus decided to contact scientists at other universities. My hard work paid off as I landed a marvelous opportunity: the chance to work on exoplanets with Dr. Amit Levi, then a postdoc at the Harvard Sasselov Lab. Under Dr. Levi, I mastered the art of using MD and DFT simulations to converge the N2-H2O crystal structure via equilibration, thermalization, and production runs. In particular, under Dr. Levi’s mentorship, I adopted Van der Waals and Plauttuew’s model for filled ice and computationally implemented it to obtain the canonical partition function for nitrogen filled ice. We combined this theoretical model with our MD simulations to calculate the entropy for N2-H2O crystal structure. Dr. Levi had previously done a similar project for CH4, but with the code in MATLAB. Not only did I convert more than 1,300 lines of his MATLAB code to Python, but I also modified every single algorithm to incorporate molecular Nitrogen and specifically the three compositions of N2 Hydrate that we studied. My algorithms were two orders of magnitude faster than Dr. Levi’s original scripts. After creating three of the four figures for the paper, I independently drafted the entire 24-page first draft of the manuscript. Dr. Levi and I subsequently worked together to improve the manuscript to its final form, which has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. We found that Nitrogen can indeed be outgassed from water worlds. I presented a poster on our results at the 2023 Vilnius University Europlanet Conference. While working with Dr. Levi, I received an email from Richard Schwartz, a Math Professor at Brown University, who informed me of the Triangular Billiards Problem (TBP). The problem asks, “Do all triangles contain a periodic orbit?”. I found the problem intriguing and decided to pursue it independently. I threw every single lesson I learned from solving the generalized Brachistochrone problem at the TBP, but failed to develop a solution. I thus decided to conduct some numerical analyses to obtain intuition about the dynamical system. Using the Machine Learning techniques I developed at the Meriles Lab, I developed an LSTM neural network to predict the long-term path of a light beam. The network achieved 53% accuracy, significantly above random guessing (33%), but it also failed to find any patterns in the phase space of the system. For the next few months, I returned to the problem every single weekend but made little to no progress. But one single night changed everything: 8 months later, while working on my EM II homework, a thought suddenly gripped me: what if the triangle began moving at relativistic speeds? The path would then remain manifestly invariant by the second postulate of special relativity, which one could then leverage to derive a completely generalized relativistic law of reflection! 4 months of intense calculations later, I created a new formula for relativistic reflection from an inclined mirror. In the correct limits, my formula reduces to the relations of Einstein, Euclid, and Gjurchinovski. What started as a weekend hobby project 20 months ago blossomed into a full-fledged paper, “Radiation in a Moving Cavity” (arXiv:2307.15000). I am the sole author of this paper, and I have submitted it for publication in The European Journal of Physics. I am currently working on several new ideas: "Carnot-Jeans Engine: A Hypothetical Rocket Propulsion System", "A Telephone in the Ocean of Water Worlds", and "From Flies to Photons". As the famous quote goes, 'Imitation is the greatest form of flattery'. I am only trying to imitate the creativity of Mother Nature, and the results are the papers and ideas that flow out of my mind.