|
|
||
|
the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
|
This will be short. Mysteriously, after screwing around all this week, I now have work to do. Come on, does that seem fair? That I should have to work while at work? Jeez. I'm reading this book Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. Odd for me, I know. I've never been a science person (except I did enjoy cell biology: man do I love me some cytoplasm!), but this book is so well-written (and the author mercifully saves all equations for an appendix, so they are skippable) that I was doing fine up until the sixth chapter. Now I am slightly lost, however. I'm not sure how I feel about all this physics stuff, anyway. On one level I find it utterly fascinating, even though I don't understand it very well. It's like magic, these quarks and neutrinos bouncing around unseen. (Plus, it's fun to say or even think the words "quark" and "neutrino.") And black holes are just cool, there's no two ways about it. But on the other hand some painfully practical part of me just thinks, who cares? A new discovery, a new particle, the Unified Field Theory, and that affects my life exactly how? It also reminds me of a time when I was very depressed. This is going to sound crazy, but during one of my worst depressive episodes I just could not stop thinking about the amount of STUFF in the world. Everywhere you look, there's another THING. Millions and millions of things all crammed together, most of them (at least in my urban surroundings) manufactured in some way. Just thinking about all those things made me tired and depressed, which made me stay in bed all day, which ultimately made me go crawling back to the psychiatrist for some sort of get-the-hell-out-of-bed medicine. I told you it would sound crazy. Thank goodness I hadn't read The Elegant Universe during that time. Then I would have been obsessing about how much stuff there is at the subatomic level as well, and I think my brain would have imploded. On a lighter note (but in keeping with the gigantic theme of The Universe that we've got going here), a church I passed today had hung out a sign that said "God is Cool." Man, you would think that if anyone would be beyond notions of coolness, it would be god. ----mimi "gluon" smartypants back/forward |
