My favorite memory of Maria Toledano popped into my head last night.
It was in Ms. Havern's epidemiology class, which we took first semester senior year. Often, we would do experiments that required sterilization of metal innoculation loops, which would be used to add bacteria to Petri dishes and other nice environments for them, and to sterilize the loops we would hold them in an ethanol flame.
As inevitably happens in a high school "science" class filled with fuckall seniors, the ethanol got spilled one day while Maria and I were working in a group. She went to clean it up and I said to her, jokingly, "you should probably just burn it. That stuff's clean, it won't make any smoke."
I'd barely finished saying these words before she, with a huge grin, struck a match. I didn't have time to object before she dropped it on the puddle sitting on the table.
I was right, there was no smoke, and the whole spill went up into carbon dioxide and steam in just a few seconds, not even emitting enough light to be noticed by Ms. Havern.
From that day on, Maria made a point of spilling ethanol on the table and burning it in fun patterns whenever we were doing any experiments. It started with a simple happy face, which looked like it was crying flames because the eyes had to be linked to the mouth. She would write obsenities in ethanol and burn them. The flaming "fuck," in particular, cracked me up the most.
I was a bit annoyed at the time, because I wanted to do the work for the class and not pull my papers away just before she threw the match, but in retrospect, Epidemiology was the most bullshit class I've ever had. I got an A in it without doing any work or handing in anything. Maria detected this bullshit much better than I ever did.
It turns out that the answer to my question is much simpler than I thought. My hunch was that water in the atmosphere somehow bent light to conform to its crystalization pattern. This was off. As Blaylock put it, "The answer isn't out there, the answer is in your camera."
My camera, I have discovered, has a hexagonal aperture, which causes a hexagonal diffraction pattern, not a hexagonal light scattering pattern through gasses, which, I realize now, makes absolutely no sense in regular experience. The Hubble, on the other hand, is designed in such a way that creates a square diffraction pattern, though it has a circular lens.
The next question, which I'd realized without seeing the signifigance of, was phrased by Blaylock. "Stars have a diffraction pattern, but galaxies don't. Why do you think that is?"
The answer was immediately obvious to me, but may not be to the reader. A star is, for all intents and purposes, a fixed point of light. A galaxy, however, though just as bright, from the right distance, is much larger and much further away. The individual stars that we do see do create diffraction patterns of their own, but the effect is smeared and blurred by the sheer distances involved. To clarify, the angular distance between one star on one side of a galaxy and another star on the other side of the same galaxy is just enough, over billions of light years, to blur out any diffraction pattern. If the galaxy itself shows any diffraction pattern at all, it's insignifigant and hard to see.
A star creates a diffraction pattern when a galaxy doesn't for the same reason a laser going through a double-slit creates a diffraction pattern while a regular lightbulb shone on a double slit doesn't. The distance differences, the uncertainty of original position of light as it tries to interfere, gives you a clear image.
My camera, I have discovered, has a hexagonal aperture, which causes a hexagonal diffraction pattern, not a hexagonal light scattering pattern through gasses, which, I realize now, makes absolutely no sense in regular experience. The Hubble, on the other hand, is designed in such a way that creates a square diffraction pattern, though it has a circular lens.
The next question, which I'd realized without seeing the signifigance of, was phrased by Blaylock. "Stars have a diffraction pattern, but galaxies don't. Why do you think that is?"
The answer was immediately obvious to me, but may not be to the reader. A star is, for all intents and purposes, a fixed point of light. A galaxy, however, though just as bright, from the right distance, is much larger and much further away. The individual stars that we do see do create diffraction patterns of their own, but the effect is smeared and blurred by the sheer distances involved. To clarify, the angular distance between one star on one side of a galaxy and another star on the other side of the same galaxy is just enough, over billions of light years, to blur out any diffraction pattern. If the galaxy itself shows any diffraction pattern at all, it's insignifigant and hard to see.
A star creates a diffraction pattern when a galaxy doesn't for the same reason a laser going through a double-slit creates a diffraction pattern while a regular lightbulb shone on a double slit doesn't. The distance differences, the uncertainty of original position of light as it tries to interfere, gives you a clear image.
I'm pondering. To best convey the object of my pondering, I need to offer some evidence, up front.
These three pictures, the first two taken by myself and the third taken by the hubble space telescope, have a stark difference between them that I recently noticed. The first picture is of the sun, obviously. The exposure was about a thousanth of a second, as I recall, as quick as my camera could take it.
The second picture was taken outside at dusk and was an 8-second exposure while steadied by a cement pillar.
The third picture was taken over the course of a year by the Hubble Space Telescope, and most objects in it are galaxies. There are, however, 6 stars, easily recognizable by their cross-like scattering pattern.
It is in these scattering patterns where my confusion lies. In the pictures that I took, the light spread out in a 6-sided pattern, hexagonally. In the Hubble picture, the light spreads out in 4 directions, quadrilaterally.
What is bending the light in our atmosphere to make it behave like this?
These three pictures, the first two taken by myself and the third taken by the hubble space telescope, have a stark difference between them that I recently noticed. The first picture is of the sun, obviously. The exposure was about a thousanth of a second, as I recall, as quick as my camera could take it.
The second picture was taken outside at dusk and was an 8-second exposure while steadied by a cement pillar.
The third picture was taken over the course of a year by the Hubble Space Telescope, and most objects in it are galaxies. There are, however, 6 stars, easily recognizable by their cross-like scattering pattern.
It is in these scattering patterns where my confusion lies. In the pictures that I took, the light spread out in a 6-sided pattern, hexagonally. In the Hubble picture, the light spreads out in 4 directions, quadrilaterally.
What is bending the light in our atmosphere to make it behave like this?
The New York Times' Tom Freidman purports that we're in a cold war with Iran. As we meddle with the middle east, they meddle to stop us and to fuck with us, and any direct attack on them by us would spell disaster for Israel. This seems to fit my version of reality pretty well, so I have to wonder: is it evidence of a cold war or just coincidence that the CIA is now recruiting through an ad on the New York Times' homepage?
I have taken two pictures of the vastness of the universe. both of them, conceptually, at least, came out of my own mind. one is photoshopped.
http://jakethrockmorton.googlepages.com/galaxy-eynightseconddraft.jpg
and
http://jakethrockmorton.googlepages.com/P1020155.JPG
they each came into being simultaneously, and each try to convey the same idea. they deserve some explanation.
I took the picture that makes the foreground of the nightscape on thursday night. I was in the middle of a paper that I was writing for Guy Blaylock's conceptual quantum physics class and contemplating quite deeply the meaning of the EPR paradox and Bell's inequality as it relates to quantum entanglement and moreso as it relates to me. Am I just a packet of information entangled with a photon speeding through the universe, set to coincidentally hit a machine that can teleport my state through entangled quantum teleportation, or is there a God?
I left the library having written one sentence, the first sentence, the most important sentence from which all else in the paper flows, utterly exhausted from the effort that it took. I stopped in the dining hall and had a plate of chicken wings absentmindedly, as I wrote more on my laptop about what little I understand of quantum physics. I left, intent on finishing my paper.
And then, I saw the rock.
I've been living in Sylvan for 8 or 9 months now, depending on how you count it, and for about half of that time that rock, a boulder resting about ten feet above the path on the way to the dorms, wasn't covered by snow and was therefore accessible. Despite its near-constant accessibility for the last 2 months, I'd never noticed it like I did around 11:30 on Thursday night.
I whipped my camera out and positioned it on the rock, aiming it down toward Lederle, catching most of the northern part of campus in one shot. That shot is the foreground of the nightscape. I took many more pictures that night, but that one was the most usable.
I went up after about an hour and settled in to finish my paper, which I did within 2 hours. I'll probably get an A on it. I had a job interview the next morning for a summer job in physics education, an awesome job involving the creation of nanotechnology education videos, and I didn't want to be half-asleep for it.
I had the oddest dream that night, the implications of which I've been coping with ever since. It was about the number two, which I represented in my mind as 2 boxes. Through some sort of mitosis-like process, these two boxes were squared, then cubed, so that I had a 2x2x2 cube. Happy at that, I decided that there was no limit here, that I wasn't bound by experience in my ability to abstract what the next power would look like, so I then visualized 2^4.
It looked strange. The simplest description is that of two identical cubes, each at the end of a 4th dimensional line, which I knew enough to abstract as time. I was now, I identified, looking at 16 unit^3-seconds. This wasn't so hard to imagine; it simply put an object's temporal dimension into a visual abstraction, allowing for instantaneous viewing of several moments of its existence.
I kept going. 2^5 abstracted as something that I lack the original language to describe. Width, in time, has been long-covered by science fiction writers: it contains the different things that could be happening now if the past were different. so here I was, looking at 4 states of the same cube; an earlier version and later counterpart in one dimension, one parallel history of the 2^3 cube, and another earlier and later state, with a different set of circumstances that came before.
I was dreaming, so the theta waves massaged my brain into believing all this. In fact, I was comfortable. So comforable that I proceeded to 2^6. Not unfamiliar territory, because it looked enough like 2^5, and has a subtle difference. On this set of time axes, 2^6 is a cube, not a square, and a cube allows for diagonal travel. I was seeing, in the same image, 4 1-dimensional timelines of this cube, but not only those lines, but the lines between them. Here, almost, is where language breaks down in its ability to describe these abstractions. 3-dimensional time and 2-dimensional time are different, but it is hard to describe how.
A Mobius loop, in space, can be best represented by a strip of paper that is twisted an odd number of times with its ends taped together. Casual examination will reveal to the casual scientist that this object, for all intents and purposes, is one-dimensional, though it exists in 3-dimensional space. It has only one side, and only length, if the width of the sheet is ignored.
A Mobius loop in time elucidates the difference between 2-dimensional time of the 2^5 abstraction and the 3-dimensional time of the 2^6 abstraction. Just as a Mobius loop in space can't exist in 2 dimensions because it couldn't be twisted, the horrible-to-think-of temporal Mobius loop could only exist in 6-dimensional spacetime, where 2^6 could be best represented as a 64 unit^3 second^3 hypercube.
I kept abstracting upwards in this dream. However, past the above points, words cannot describe what I saw, and if better physicists than me have thought of such words, then I do not understand them enough to duplicate them. I arrived at a 2^8 megasquare and promptly dreamt about something else.
Come morning, these abstractions temporarily flew from my mind as I prepared myself for the job interview with Professor Tuominen. Nanotechnology research sure as hell beats the shit out of the Border Cafe for summer employment, so when I heard about this job I jumped at it.
Walking out of his office a couple of hours later, feeling somewhat ambiguous, I went to Professor Blaylock's lecture, which I, a thousand years ago, had done a paper for. The dream begun to nag at me, but didn't have time to take hold before Blaylock put on the screen the single most fascinating picture of the sky that I had ever seen.
He identified it as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field survey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_ultra_deep_field), a picture of a seemingly empty region of the sky that, in a picture taken over the course of a year, contains about 10,000 galaxies, and by my count, 6 visible stars. The scope of this snapshot of celestial history shocked and awed me into forgetting almost completely about the number 2. I did forget about it, until class ended, anyway.
During lecture, Professor Blaylock explained the concept of John Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment, an experiment involving sending light through a beam splitter and deciding before the light would hit another one whether the second beam splitter should be placed or not, making the apparatus an interferometer or not. Statistically, the results of this experiment point inequivocably to one conclusion. Not only does the presence of the second beam splitter alter the path of the photon beam in the future, it alters it in the past, as well. Until the lights hits the delayed-in-being-placed beam splitter, or not, the path of the light to the detectors is undefined; it can be said to have taken both paths. However, if the beam splitter is placed and the light makes it through to a detector, by nature of the experiment it could only have taken one path. The inevitible conclusion is nonlocality in time.
This took me a few moments to grasp, but I subconsciously tied it to the dream that I had had the night before. Instinctively, I asked Professor Blaylock when I could meet him in his office to discuss the thoughts running through my mind, which were slowly increasing in speed and intensity.
Mandy tagged along and we waited outside Blaylock's office, looking at pinned-up newspaper articles about the LHC at CERN. As always, we discussed what would be said to the Professor so that we wouldn't waste his time. I told Mandy about my dream; she kind of got it. She responded with a comment on Wheeler's experiment: if, by Special Relativity, things that go the speed of light, namely photons, do not experience the effects of time, why should it matter when their wave function is collapsed? They certainly don't care. In essence, she was saying, we can't see the wave collapse of a photon from our reference point. A photon's reference point, being independent of time, exists in a collapsed state, because its end is the same as its beginning.
Blaylock arrived, and I started talking. I don't recall precisely what I said, but I conveyed my philosophical confusion with quantum mechanics, relating Schrodinger's cat, Wigner's friend and Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, along with the reference point paradox that Mandy had brought up in the hall, all into one great, grand question, which was, "Does collapse have to happen in a single, well-defined moment in time?"
Professor Blaylock, the single smartest human being that I know and who knows my name as well, took a slight breath and said, simply, "Good!"
Apparantly I had hit on something. He insisted that he had no answer for me, but gave me several key terms to search on if I wanted to read further on the philosophical ramifications of what I was saying, but I knew that I had reached the best logical solution, and it bolstered me into unknown territory. So I brought up the dream.
He sat there in silence as I drew, to the best of my ability, the first 6 dimensions in terms of 2. As I did so, I became slightly wild-eyed and overcome with the ramifications of it, finally. When I explained to him that I could see beyond 6 but couldn't describe it, he said that I was very close to String Theory, which contains 10 or 11 dimensions, depending on whom you ask. He then conveyed to me the single strangest cautionary tale that I'd ever heard.
A woman that he knew had once taught a graduate student who claimed to be able to see, or imagine, or visually abstract, if you will, 9 or 10 dimensions. He understood the math and could see it, so he was well on his way to becoming a prominent string theorist. However, he cut himself short by jumping out of a window before he received his Ph.D..
Meanwhile, I was slowly going more and more mad, just sitting there, seeming calm, though excited with myself. I don't know if he sensed my difficulty coping with the burden of such an imagination, or if he thought that it was a morbidly funny story worth sharing, but it helped.
Mandy and I thanked him for his time and left, and went to eat. Needing a moment of quiet to draw what was in my mind, I handed Mandy my computer and told her to read this story off of the SomethingAwful forums called "A Bomb in the Building," which related slightly to the lines I was drawing along, aside from being hilarious. The link might not last, but: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2819309
While sitting there, I drew the second picture that I linked way at the beginning of this post. It made me feel better, slightly, but at this point I was so burnt out and tired from the sheer volume of thinking I'd been doing that day that I had a splitting headache. I wanted to get the thoughts out before they went away.
A night passed, I suppose, though it felt like longer. I was looking through the pictures that I had dumped off of my camera onto my computer and decided to create a picture of a more tangible infinity than the dimensional one, so I grafted a portion of the Hubble Deep Field Survey onto the sky of a picture that I had taken, the result of which, the reader, no doubt, has seen by now.
One thing about the picture frustrates me, though. Light in our atmosphere diffracts in a hexagonal pattern. The 3 stars in that portion of the Hubble picture have their light diffracted in a square pattern, because there is no free hydrogen in the way of the Hubble, a space telescope. The terrestrial lights and the stars don't match, and it frustrates me.
This last afterthought, about, of all things, diffraction patterns of light through atmosphere and vacuum, convinces me, in addition to everything else that I've been thinking about over the last 2 days, that I'm a physicist, and am right to choose it as my major.
Yes, that's where all this was going.
http://jakethrockmorton.googlepages.com/galaxy-eynightseconddraft.jpg
and
http://jakethrockmorton.googlepages.com/P1020155.JPG
they each came into being simultaneously, and each try to convey the same idea. they deserve some explanation.
I took the picture that makes the foreground of the nightscape on thursday night. I was in the middle of a paper that I was writing for Guy Blaylock's conceptual quantum physics class and contemplating quite deeply the meaning of the EPR paradox and Bell's inequality as it relates to quantum entanglement and moreso as it relates to me. Am I just a packet of information entangled with a photon speeding through the universe, set to coincidentally hit a machine that can teleport my state through entangled quantum teleportation, or is there a God?
I left the library having written one sentence, the first sentence, the most important sentence from which all else in the paper flows, utterly exhausted from the effort that it took. I stopped in the dining hall and had a plate of chicken wings absentmindedly, as I wrote more on my laptop about what little I understand of quantum physics. I left, intent on finishing my paper.
And then, I saw the rock.
I've been living in Sylvan for 8 or 9 months now, depending on how you count it, and for about half of that time that rock, a boulder resting about ten feet above the path on the way to the dorms, wasn't covered by snow and was therefore accessible. Despite its near-constant accessibility for the last 2 months, I'd never noticed it like I did around 11:30 on Thursday night.
I whipped my camera out and positioned it on the rock, aiming it down toward Lederle, catching most of the northern part of campus in one shot. That shot is the foreground of the nightscape. I took many more pictures that night, but that one was the most usable.
I went up after about an hour and settled in to finish my paper, which I did within 2 hours. I'll probably get an A on it. I had a job interview the next morning for a summer job in physics education, an awesome job involving the creation of nanotechnology education videos, and I didn't want to be half-asleep for it.
I had the oddest dream that night, the implications of which I've been coping with ever since. It was about the number two, which I represented in my mind as 2 boxes. Through some sort of mitosis-like process, these two boxes were squared, then cubed, so that I had a 2x2x2 cube. Happy at that, I decided that there was no limit here, that I wasn't bound by experience in my ability to abstract what the next power would look like, so I then visualized 2^4.
It looked strange. The simplest description is that of two identical cubes, each at the end of a 4th dimensional line, which I knew enough to abstract as time. I was now, I identified, looking at 16 unit^3-seconds. This wasn't so hard to imagine; it simply put an object's temporal dimension into a visual abstraction, allowing for instantaneous viewing of several moments of its existence.
I kept going. 2^5 abstracted as something that I lack the original language to describe. Width, in time, has been long-covered by science fiction writers: it contains the different things that could be happening now if the past were different. so here I was, looking at 4 states of the same cube; an earlier version and later counterpart in one dimension, one parallel history of the 2^3 cube, and another earlier and later state, with a different set of circumstances that came before.
I was dreaming, so the theta waves massaged my brain into believing all this. In fact, I was comfortable. So comforable that I proceeded to 2^6. Not unfamiliar territory, because it looked enough like 2^5, and has a subtle difference. On this set of time axes, 2^6 is a cube, not a square, and a cube allows for diagonal travel. I was seeing, in the same image, 4 1-dimensional timelines of this cube, but not only those lines, but the lines between them. Here, almost, is where language breaks down in its ability to describe these abstractions. 3-dimensional time and 2-dimensional time are different, but it is hard to describe how.
A Mobius loop, in space, can be best represented by a strip of paper that is twisted an odd number of times with its ends taped together. Casual examination will reveal to the casual scientist that this object, for all intents and purposes, is one-dimensional, though it exists in 3-dimensional space. It has only one side, and only length, if the width of the sheet is ignored.
A Mobius loop in time elucidates the difference between 2-dimensional time of the 2^5 abstraction and the 3-dimensional time of the 2^6 abstraction. Just as a Mobius loop in space can't exist in 2 dimensions because it couldn't be twisted, the horrible-to-think-of temporal Mobius loop could only exist in 6-dimensional spacetime, where 2^6 could be best represented as a 64 unit^3 second^3 hypercube.
I kept abstracting upwards in this dream. However, past the above points, words cannot describe what I saw, and if better physicists than me have thought of such words, then I do not understand them enough to duplicate them. I arrived at a 2^8 megasquare and promptly dreamt about something else.
Come morning, these abstractions temporarily flew from my mind as I prepared myself for the job interview with Professor Tuominen. Nanotechnology research sure as hell beats the shit out of the Border Cafe for summer employment, so when I heard about this job I jumped at it.
Walking out of his office a couple of hours later, feeling somewhat ambiguous, I went to Professor Blaylock's lecture, which I, a thousand years ago, had done a paper for. The dream begun to nag at me, but didn't have time to take hold before Blaylock put on the screen the single most fascinating picture of the sky that I had ever seen.
He identified it as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field survey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_ultra_deep_field), a picture of a seemingly empty region of the sky that, in a picture taken over the course of a year, contains about 10,000 galaxies, and by my count, 6 visible stars. The scope of this snapshot of celestial history shocked and awed me into forgetting almost completely about the number 2. I did forget about it, until class ended, anyway.
During lecture, Professor Blaylock explained the concept of John Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment, an experiment involving sending light through a beam splitter and deciding before the light would hit another one whether the second beam splitter should be placed or not, making the apparatus an interferometer or not. Statistically, the results of this experiment point inequivocably to one conclusion. Not only does the presence of the second beam splitter alter the path of the photon beam in the future, it alters it in the past, as well. Until the lights hits the delayed-in-being-placed beam splitter, or not, the path of the light to the detectors is undefined; it can be said to have taken both paths. However, if the beam splitter is placed and the light makes it through to a detector, by nature of the experiment it could only have taken one path. The inevitible conclusion is nonlocality in time.
This took me a few moments to grasp, but I subconsciously tied it to the dream that I had had the night before. Instinctively, I asked Professor Blaylock when I could meet him in his office to discuss the thoughts running through my mind, which were slowly increasing in speed and intensity.
Mandy tagged along and we waited outside Blaylock's office, looking at pinned-up newspaper articles about the LHC at CERN. As always, we discussed what would be said to the Professor so that we wouldn't waste his time. I told Mandy about my dream; she kind of got it. She responded with a comment on Wheeler's experiment: if, by Special Relativity, things that go the speed of light, namely photons, do not experience the effects of time, why should it matter when their wave function is collapsed? They certainly don't care. In essence, she was saying, we can't see the wave collapse of a photon from our reference point. A photon's reference point, being independent of time, exists in a collapsed state, because its end is the same as its beginning.
Blaylock arrived, and I started talking. I don't recall precisely what I said, but I conveyed my philosophical confusion with quantum mechanics, relating Schrodinger's cat, Wigner's friend and Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, along with the reference point paradox that Mandy had brought up in the hall, all into one great, grand question, which was, "Does collapse have to happen in a single, well-defined moment in time?"
Professor Blaylock, the single smartest human being that I know and who knows my name as well, took a slight breath and said, simply, "Good!"
Apparantly I had hit on something. He insisted that he had no answer for me, but gave me several key terms to search on if I wanted to read further on the philosophical ramifications of what I was saying, but I knew that I had reached the best logical solution, and it bolstered me into unknown territory. So I brought up the dream.
He sat there in silence as I drew, to the best of my ability, the first 6 dimensions in terms of 2. As I did so, I became slightly wild-eyed and overcome with the ramifications of it, finally. When I explained to him that I could see beyond 6 but couldn't describe it, he said that I was very close to String Theory, which contains 10 or 11 dimensions, depending on whom you ask. He then conveyed to me the single strangest cautionary tale that I'd ever heard.
A woman that he knew had once taught a graduate student who claimed to be able to see, or imagine, or visually abstract, if you will, 9 or 10 dimensions. He understood the math and could see it, so he was well on his way to becoming a prominent string theorist. However, he cut himself short by jumping out of a window before he received his Ph.D..
Meanwhile, I was slowly going more and more mad, just sitting there, seeming calm, though excited with myself. I don't know if he sensed my difficulty coping with the burden of such an imagination, or if he thought that it was a morbidly funny story worth sharing, but it helped.
Mandy and I thanked him for his time and left, and went to eat. Needing a moment of quiet to draw what was in my mind, I handed Mandy my computer and told her to read this story off of the SomethingAwful forums called "A Bomb in the Building," which related slightly to the lines I was drawing along, aside from being hilarious. The link might not last, but: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2819309
While sitting there, I drew the second picture that I linked way at the beginning of this post. It made me feel better, slightly, but at this point I was so burnt out and tired from the sheer volume of thinking I'd been doing that day that I had a splitting headache. I wanted to get the thoughts out before they went away.
A night passed, I suppose, though it felt like longer. I was looking through the pictures that I had dumped off of my camera onto my computer and decided to create a picture of a more tangible infinity than the dimensional one, so I grafted a portion of the Hubble Deep Field Survey onto the sky of a picture that I had taken, the result of which, the reader, no doubt, has seen by now.
One thing about the picture frustrates me, though. Light in our atmosphere diffracts in a hexagonal pattern. The 3 stars in that portion of the Hubble picture have their light diffracted in a square pattern, because there is no free hydrogen in the way of the Hubble, a space telescope. The terrestrial lights and the stars don't match, and it frustrates me.
This last afterthought, about, of all things, diffraction patterns of light through atmosphere and vacuum, convinces me, in addition to everything else that I've been thinking about over the last 2 days, that I'm a physicist, and am right to choose it as my major.
Yes, that's where all this was going.
I just had a long stretch of about two weeks wherein I was so stressed about classes that I had no creativity whatsoever. the creativity reached it apex in new york, where I mixed together dozens of audio tracks into one cohesive cacophony. I took the LibriVox reading of Moby Dick and mixed all the tracks together, then overdubbed every single Beethoven symphony. it gives off the effect of being in a crowded room with violins tuning, a lull before the concert that never really starts. it's 90 minutes long. I captured the moment before a concert and stretched it out into 90 minutes, from easily 50 hours of audio. it's perfect.
but then I came back to school from new york and calculus hit me like a brick. I only just now got the flow that allowed me to do anything creative at all back. I guess this is why I'm not asleep; it's 4am. it's 4am and I'm charging my camera battery in a library outlet so that I can take some night shots, because tonight, I realized, is perfect.
I sound like Ed Wood.
but then I came back to school from new york and calculus hit me like a brick. I only just now got the flow that allowed me to do anything creative at all back. I guess this is why I'm not asleep; it's 4am. it's 4am and I'm charging my camera battery in a library outlet so that I can take some night shots, because tonight, I realized, is perfect.
I sound like Ed Wood.
there has been a minor setback. my camera is out of juice. I hope I can charge its battery here before the dawn. in the meanwhile, I'll give my paper another pass, and maybe articulate why I'm signed up for French 126 for next semester.
I intend to take french to the point where I wouldn't be too completely handicapped upon arriving in Paris. three semesters of intensives should get the job done. I want to go there, marry a cute radical socialist girl to obtain citizenship and then blow up cars and throw bricks at police. we have no revolution going on here, and there won't be one during my span of caring. France is where I need to go for it.
Maybe I'll emerge a conqueror.
I intend to take french to the point where I wouldn't be too completely handicapped upon arriving in Paris. three semesters of intensives should get the job done. I want to go there, marry a cute radical socialist girl to obtain citizenship and then blow up cars and throw bricks at police. we have no revolution going on here, and there won't be one during my span of caring. France is where I need to go for it.
Maybe I'll emerge a conqueror.
I'm inside a dark cave stuck on a device that puts the entire world's information into a 15 inch screen and claims to be worth the price it takes from my creativity. all bets are off, though; it just started raining outside. my options are twofold now that I have finished what is required of me for tonight. hide or frolic. I brought my camera and always wanted to know how well it could capture at 3am in the rain.
whoever needs drugs to have fun on a night like this ought to get therapy. mushrooms would be awesome right now, but the things I want to do would be hindered by them.
off I go.
whoever needs drugs to have fun on a night like this ought to get therapy. mushrooms would be awesome right now, but the things I want to do would be hindered by them.
off I go.
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