From the lecture notes - 2
From the lecture notes - 2
Hello all, happy to be here, etc. (It’s the physics club, thank them—but don’t try to pronounce the president’s name, for goodness sake. Nastasyaczarinaannabellaanaastasia Bukaloogalovkovna or something…Find out a nickname you can call her.)
Now I know you all would rather have some equations and diagrams to get your hands on, greek letters and german accents and an array of mechanisms that might do something or might just explode—in the name of scientific inquiry, of course—but as it happens I have something else in store for you this evening. It is couched in the parlance of the boring side of science—it’s the junk you have to write after the experiments and the formulas, to explain to other people who aren’t as smart as you what it is they are missing. See what you think:
“Didactically speaking, seminal evidence seems to explicate the fact that your repudiation of entropy supports my theory of space-time synthesis. Of this, I am irrefutably confident.”
It’s first of all perplexing, particularly for the audience the game originally supposed. But pretty soon after that, it’s funny. Especially for that same audience, who, if they can sound out the words, can revel in the delicious complexity of their sound. And also for us, who know what all of the words mean: didactic, with its cousin pedantic, which is what I’m being right now; seminal, with its equal parts importance, influence, and the other thing, shall we say, generative vigor; explicate, like explain but more minute; and lastly entropy and space-time synthesis, which are the crux of this rambling declaration. Luckily for you, they’re well within your province of expertise, but, to my chagrin, they are a tad outside of mine. If we could take them at face value, though, and propose a working definition that will fit our purposes: entropy is the inefficiency inherent in any system, it’s the thing that sooner or later stops the perpetual motion machine and the thing that will someday write RIP across the universe as a whole. And space-time is Einstein—ah, just saying the name, Einstein, just makes you smile—space-time is Einstein’s model of the universe as four dimensions, bent by matter, suffused by light, quaint in comparison to quantum mechanics and strings and what-have-you…but, Einstein, man, Einstein.
That is a silly reason to take space-time seriously if you are a scientist, I suppose; I wouldn’t insist on it for you. But for me, clearly no scientist, and for that mass of educated amateurs, the glamor of the name Einstein, his personality and all that is associated with it, is enough. Space-time entrances us: the dream of a purposeful, at least partly orderly universe draws us like gravity.
I think it is something like that charisma that is at work on our Unassuming Local Guy in the Stoic Club here. If he is addressing Ness and friends, the “repudiation of entropy” to which he refers must be their determination to defeat Giygas, universal cosmic destroyer, embodiment of entropy; the “seminal evidence” is their awesome adventures, their successes thus far, the fact that they are there—that is perhaps the most amazing thing of all, isn’t it? Against all odds, here we are. Well, more on that another time.
Of course it is entirely possible that our speaker is addressing someone else, or that he has simply memorized these words and says them whenever someone is passing by, in an attempt to impress them. Hmm, trying to sound intellectual to impress strangers…who does that remind me of?
Either way, whether it is profound existential goodness or a highfalutin bit of social posturing, the best response on out part is to smile: for joy if we see the former, for the silliness of the latter, and if we see them both, we can laugh at that, too. Yes, hopefully we can laugh at ourselves here. Those people in the Stoic Club, abusing the Zen rock meditation bit and the Western rational scientific tradition all at one go, what’s worse, sitting inside while at the most beautiful resort you can imagine the sun is shining and the sky is blue and they are there, sitting inside sipping water—we are very nearly those brilliant, idiotic people.
From the lecture notes - 2
Hello all, happy to be here, etc. (It’s the physics club, thank them—but don’t try to pronounce the president’s name, for goodness sake. Nastasyaczarinaannabellaanaastasia Bukaloogalovkovna or something…Find out a nickname you can call her.)
Now I know you all would rather have some equations and diagrams to get your hands on, greek letters and german accents and an array of mechanisms that might do something or might just explode—in the name of scientific inquiry, of course—but as it happens I have something else in store for you this evening. It is couched in the parlance of the boring side of science—it’s the junk you have to write after the experiments and the formulas, to explain to other people who aren’t as smart as you what it is they are missing. See what you think:
“Didactically speaking, seminal evidence seems to explicate the fact that your repudiation of entropy supports my theory of space-time synthesis. Of this, I am irrefutably confident.”
It’s first of all perplexing, particularly for the audience the game originally supposed. But pretty soon after that, it’s funny. Especially for that same audience, who, if they can sound out the words, can revel in the delicious complexity of their sound. And also for us, who know what all of the words mean: didactic, with its cousin pedantic, which is what I’m being right now; seminal, with its equal parts importance, influence, and the other thing, shall we say, generative vigor; explicate, like explain but more minute; and lastly entropy and space-time synthesis, which are the crux of this rambling declaration. Luckily for you, they’re well within your province of expertise, but, to my chagrin, they are a tad outside of mine. If we could take them at face value, though, and propose a working definition that will fit our purposes: entropy is the inefficiency inherent in any system, it’s the thing that sooner or later stops the perpetual motion machine and the thing that will someday write RIP across the universe as a whole. And space-time is Einstein—ah, just saying the name, Einstein, just makes you smile—space-time is Einstein’s model of the universe as four dimensions, bent by matter, suffused by light, quaint in comparison to quantum mechanics and strings and what-have-you…but, Einstein, man, Einstein.
That is a silly reason to take space-time seriously if you are a scientist, I suppose; I wouldn’t insist on it for you. But for me, clearly no scientist, and for that mass of educated amateurs, the glamor of the name Einstein, his personality and all that is associated with it, is enough. Space-time entrances us: the dream of a purposeful, at least partly orderly universe draws us like gravity.
I think it is something like that charisma that is at work on our Unassuming Local Guy in the Stoic Club here. If he is addressing Ness and friends, the “repudiation of entropy” to which he refers must be their determination to defeat Giygas, universal cosmic destroyer, embodiment of entropy; the “seminal evidence” is their awesome adventures, their successes thus far, the fact that they are there—that is perhaps the most amazing thing of all, isn’t it? Against all odds, here we are. Well, more on that another time.
Of course it is entirely possible that our speaker is addressing someone else, or that he has simply memorized these words and says them whenever someone is passing by, in an attempt to impress them. Hmm, trying to sound intellectual to impress strangers…who does that remind me of?
Either way, whether it is profound existential goodness or a highfalutin bit of social posturing, the best response on out part is to smile: for joy if we see the former, for the silliness of the latter, and if we see them both, we can laugh at that, too. Yes, hopefully we can laugh at ourselves here. Those people in the Stoic Club, abusing the Zen rock meditation bit and the Western rational scientific tradition all at one go, what’s worse, sitting inside while at the most beautiful resort you can imagine the sun is shining and the sky is blue and they are there, sitting inside sipping water—we are very nearly those brilliant, idiotic people.
