_____<br/><br/>Remus had been at the library for hours without feeling like he had gained any clarity. Logically he understood it was perfectly reasonable that he hadn’t; a doctorate was a monumental amount of work spread across several long years, and seeing steady linear progress was simply naive.<br/>Remus really wished that he could, though.<br/>Having spent days fiddling with even a rough equation to describe particle decay, Remus had gone through piles of scratched out note paper. As the afternoon drew to an end, Remus had sacrificed a few torn corners, on them writing gists of theoretical operators, no numbers or identifiers on any of the slips.<br/>Hand on his temple, he thoughtlessly moved the operators among one another, rearranging them in order and relation. Every now and then he stalled for long enough to annotate their order, hesitantly drawing a rough estimation of the graph it would produce.<br/>Pen hovering above the paper, Remus all but forfeited for the day, fatigued and discouraged by the seemingly endless options.