Things and diddles and stuff.

Today, I decided with Elliott that I would make it my quest to get onto every roof on campus by the time I leave. The issue there is that the roofs are all authorized personnel only. Students are allowed to check out keys to get into these buildings after hours and stuff, but I think that I need an actual reason...so that particular plot needs to get some stuff ironed out. Sigh.

Also, I have decided that I want to specialize in relativity in grad school, probably going into string theory postgrad. Reading stuff about quantum mechanics and relativity (for people who don't know, these are the Two Main Pillars of modern physics - relativity from Einstein and quantum mechanics developed by many people, Schrödinger and Heisenberg notably) relativity just seems prettier. If people want me to I can try to summarize stuff and kind of explain where I'm coming from but not if y'alls don't really want to hear me rant about physics.


ANYWAY on other fronts, I'm looking at rationalist philosophy and stuff trying to smack some labels on some of my thoughts. It's that thing where chances are that somebody before you has thought of that idea before...that concept is the bane of philosophy students because in IB Philosophy we would be discussing something and somebody would go "well that means that blah blah blah!" and McQueen would say "Well 200 years ago you would have been hailed as a genius. Unfortunately, Kant already said that" or something. That's how we were supposed to write philosophy papers - develop the ideas on your own and then go back and comb for stuff people have already said. I kind of like that approach because otherwise you're just writing a history paper...the only problem is that it's bad for one's ego to find out that all of the ideas that you came up with on your own were already discovered.


I suppose that's why Newton was so miffed when Leibniz published his discovery of calculus...Newton had quite the temper and it makes sense that he would be rather annoyed that somebody else came along and "stole" his masterwork.  (it's in quotes because most historians do think that Leibniz invented calculus independently - Newton went off on a MASSIVE smear campaign against Leibniz saying that he stole it. And it worked because he was in charge of the Royal Society XD)


Anyway, I ramble. I will leave with a quote, which I love to death just because having a reason to have an inflated ego is always really fun.

"Nearly all physicists at some time feel a desire to stand God-like above all creation and view the wheels of nature turn as one would look into the workings of a clock." -Evan Harris Walker, The Physics of Consciousness

 By the way, that's an awesome book for anyone who wants to get a nice overview of modern physics and all of its tasty philosophical implications. I should warn people though that there's a little side story that goes along about the author's girlfriend/wife (I'm not sure which one) dying from leukemia. That forms the premise of the book - he was always a physicist, but after her death he set off on a quest to find room in the equations of physics for there to have been more to her than just quarks and electrons. I don't really want to spoil it for anyone, but suffice it to say that there really is - it's another one of the quirks that comes out of quantum mechanics. All sorts of fun. It's quite a brain-turner of a book.

Righto, I'm off. Let me know if anyone wants me to try to give a really quick overview of QM or relativity - there are books written on it, so I couldn't do it any kind of justice, but I could try to do a little summary if anyone is curious.