Monday, March 1, 2010

Depressive episodes from seeing too much?

Probably not, but you never know. In less than 6 hours, I went from something approximating normal to this sort of moodiness bordering on depression, with no new stimuli. Sure, I am still not sure how the hell I can arrange written exams so that I can physically complete them, and I will still be somewhat worried about that until I have talked to all my professors who administer such exams and after I have successfully found a solution, really, but that is the sort of problem that is fairly routine. I am still a bit frustrated at not having anyone with whom I can discuss the ideas in my head, but there has never really been anyone, so nothing has really changed. If I had to characterize in more detail the state of my mind, moreover, I would say it is more tired than depressed, and not as in sleepy. I can still feel the sensation from my reading this weekend, the same sort of 'awareness' that I always feel when constructing lattices of information in my head, or when I am trying to wrap my head around the universe. That is in fact exactly what I was doing this weekend, using the model Mr. Latour created, and drawing it out, using all I know about space and time, and all the bits of science I have ever absorbed, only more of it fit together this time. In fact, it wasn't so much that I had bits I couldn't fit, as I am just not sure how to translate what I ended up with into text, to communicate it to others, let alone how to make it useful.

The Urantia Book, something rather bizarre that can be found in most city libraries, a rather entertaining romp worth trying to wrap your head around just for practice, btw, talked a lot about the idea of the limits to human understanding, and offered the reader challenges to just try to imagine the unimaginable. As a kid, and this was in about 6th grade, so a while ago, I fancied that some of what this book took as impossible for us to imagine was not so hard after all. In college, in physics classes, occasionally professors would mention the gulf between what even the poorer students in those classes could imagine and what they could, especially in quantum physics, because we started out from different assumptions.

All this may not 'go anywhere' tonight, but it came to mind as linked to this tired brain I am about to send off to bed for the night. At the end of the first season of the revived Doctor Who, the Doctor's life is saved by Rose, who takes the whole of the time vortex in her head, and while it might have killed her eventually, she survived a small dose of it. Donna Noble, several seasons later, is forcibly retired from accompanying the Doctor, because she has a timelord's consciousness stuffed in her brain. This all begs the question, what are the limits to what humans can understand. Every so often someone has the balls to suggest that we have solved all the big problems in science and are now just mopping up the details. (So far they all have balls, but if we wait long enough I am sure a woman will come up with something silly like that too.) So far, something has always come along to stir things up shortly after, and if Latour's model, and the glorious 4-D thing in my head are right, there is no end to science, just an expanding event horizon of our collective human understanding.

No comments: