Spam, Eggs, Baked Beans, & Spam

Evidently, doctoral students must practice writing at least 5 hours in order to obtain acceptable proficiency in the subject.  It is sad, then, to consider the neglect with which clear and incisive writing is given by scientists.  When reading a paper, we demand precision and clarity from those whose ideas we consider; and yet the art of good writing is dismissed as foppish and irrelevant.  I enjoy the florid and expository style of Dirac and Einstein, and feel remiss that this perspective seems to have died on the wind of the previous century.

I seem to be up against a task that I don’t really understand.  If I did, I would get to it, but I suppose this is what real, grown-up physics is like: not just getting the right answer, but posing the terms of the question properly.  I haven’t managed yet to get even that far.  I pray that I will succeed, but I think I might have waded in a little too deep on this one.

I can’t help but think that I’ve made a giant mistake which I will regret for the rest of my days.  I don’t want to go into specifics, but a lack of discipline will never fail to undo you.

It is taking everything I have not to fizzle and die right now.  I am a 21 year old man, and yet my parents represent as much of an intrusive annoyance across the state of Michigan as they did when I was still living at home.  Experience, yes, you’ve got it in spades, but what if the experience that fornication, drug abuse and hedonism entail isn’t what I’m looking for?  Sod off.

I am on the brink of being done with college, and yet congratulations are meaningless because I feel that all I’ve been doing is what I’m supposed to be doing; passing classes, learning, growing.  Should you be congratulated for doing what is ethically demanded of you?  I think Cicero would disagree, hence so will I.  Skeptic moderated stoicism seems to be the philosophy most cleanly associated with living a good life in the Aristotelian sense of the word.  Maybe I should grow a beard too.

Once I’ve got my Ph.D. in hand, I suppose congratulations would be in order.  By that time I will have exercised such copious ingenuity and creativity that I actually deserve some compliments from those around me.  Maybe I’m becoming an arrogant prick, which are the kinds of people that Jesus does not love.  But I just have to keep telling myself: two weeks until it’s all over.  Then I can sit back and reflect on some of what just whizzed by me in four years’ time (and twenty-six thousand dollars later).  But for the time being, I am content to stew in my acrimony and sink into a state I know I shouldn’t be in.  It’s the picture of sin.  Sometimes I see shades of comic-book mad scientists in me: the will to punish evil with knowledge, to curb blind strength beneath the yolk of wisdom.  But it would all be a shambles anyway.  I just can’t help but think that things would be better off if somebody put a bullet in the head of every strongman despot in Latin America and Africa… the reign of science begins.

Nothing makes me feel better like owning mathematics.  Sure, they’re just lifeless marks of chalk on a slate board, but why forgo the opportunity to feel like you’ve mastered something and beaten it into submission?  It’s an awfully human feeling.

I think I need help.

I’m getting the feeling that the more I know, the less it matters to know anything.  Physics is a game, a game at which I’m fairly decent, and it’s something to bide the time while I try to enjoy other facets of life that seem more firmly rooted in my consciousness, like spending time with Kendra or making new friends (something that makes me overly nervous).  It is a game played with meaningless marks on paper, as Hilbert said, and I begrudge him none.  I used to be a firm scientific realist, the nemesis of the school of Niels Bohr, but now it seems to be washing away in the sand.  Electrons may be real, but they are certainly no more real than the sensation of the keys against my fingers on the keyboard, which I hold to be fairly dubious.  I’ve become somewhat of a hyper-Platonist in that I disparage things of this world, which seem designed to trick, to deceive, to swindle until there is no treasure left to be gotten from the spirit.  I wish I didn’t have to eat, as food is one more potency that bonds you to the earth and keeps you from God.

So I do science.  I do science because otherwise, ennui would be the theme of the day and I don’t want that in the least.  I play a game, and I am fascinated with the idea that people with lots of money are willing to give me some of theirs so I can play the game with them.  But the stakes are higher in this game; to make a mistake is to not get invited back to play again.  So I believe in electrons; but I believe more in the neutrinos that are associated with them, only because they oscillate and do the things they shouldn’t, thereby pissing off the rationalists and objectivists that are oh-so-easy to tease.

I am never drinking again.  Well, maybe.

I cannot bring myself to understand what is most evidently the fabric of my experience.  I have seen it and turned away, and for that act of Platonic cave-dwelling, there can be no forgiveness.

It’s week six of the semester, and I am beginning to dread Fridays a bit less each time.  Tomorrow I have six classes, including but not limited to a quantum mechanics exam.  If it were up to me, lunch would be mandatory for all human beings, but as it stands I get no such luxuries with classes from 9 AM - 3 PM.  It now seems that there’s some small serenity in academic servitude; I have no dispute as to what it is that I’m going to do tomorrow: I will learn until the veins in my head are throbbing, then I will learn some more, and ultimately pass out in my room of exhaustion.

When a man is involved in this sort of deterministic affair, there is absolutely no illusion as to anything.  There’s a certainty in it, something peculiar, something not dissimilar to the death of the soul that attracts one the way heroin attracts the weak of heart.  I look forward to the onslaught.  After all, I’m accepted somewhere; within the year, I will be a practicing nuclear theorist, and things are looking up.  Might as well enjoy the drudgeries of getting there while I still can.