Quantum Meltdown

I picked up a new (used) book on quantum mechanics today. Every time, I forget how stressful it is to read such things. It's such fantastic stuff, and I'm so far from being able to understand it... For me, everything is a mystery—and the more I learn the more I realize I don't understand.

A couple of weeks ago it struck me that I don't even understand the mathematics I learned in grade school. I read Adam Cadre's article about trying to teach math to inner-city school kids, where he remarks on how they just don't seem to 'get it', even with such supposedly simple things as negative numbers. And then I thought, but I don't understand negative numbers either! I may be better equipped to get through life than those kids because at some point I memorized a whole list of rules to use when dealing with numbers: a negative times a negative is a positive, a positive plus a negative is the same as a positive minus the absolute value of the negative, etc. But I never learned—and this is what frustrates me the most, that nobody ever pointed out to me that I didn't know, or that there was even a question to be asked on the matter—just what a negative number was.

Positive numbers I feel I have some grasp of, through reading Bertrand Russell; they are sets of sets which have certain properties. One of those properties is their adherence to Peano's postulates, which govern progressions of symbols—but so far it's arbitrary just which symbols you use for the progression. It could be "0, 1, 2, 3 , ..." or "#, %, ^, ..."; it doesn't matter. Negatives, it seems, are a whole different story. It's not just a matter of sticking the little symbol on a number like a Post-It note. (After all, a Peano progression could be "-2, -5, 7, -&, *, -#, ...")

So I tried to find out what was going on, and it turns out (quite naturally, I suppose) that all the simple explanations are more or less just restatements of the same rules I learned in grade school. They aren't explanations in the sense that I was looking for. And the complicated ones, which may contain what I want to know, are far too complicated for me to even begin to understand. I never learned the complicated ways of thinking required to conceptualize the problem, because no one ever told me it was a problem, or taught me how to look for a solution.

The same is true for so many supposedly "simple" aspects of the universe: what is time? What does it mean to say that something happens "after" or "before" something else? How can something "cause" something else, over time (since cause is supposedly, although I don't know how to understand that either, "before" effect)? What is it about time that makes it able to transmit (if that's what it does) causes?

*Wham!* Here we are at quantum mechanics. Energy moving in four-dimentional space-time, the quantized structure of the universe. Particles having integer or half-integer spins, those integer values themselves determined by the nature of what it is to be a number in this universe. All this directly connected, without even a stretch of the imagination, to the basics of multiplying negative numbers and all those other "simple" concepts I was supposed to learn years ago.

(And lets not even get into geometry, which *wham!* becomes advanced topology—the triangle equation "a^2 = b^2+c^2", which I learned in grade school, can only be understood in the context of the fundamental topological properties of space and the way distributed values in space-time can and cannot be related given a certain mathematical model of the universe.)


And at this point my brain goes into meltdown and I end up terribly depressed and on the verge of tears.

I want to know. I want to understand things. But it's all so connected; how can you understand any little bit of it without understanding the whole? And how can you understand the whole when you are in fact part of that whole, immersed in it and affecting it even by thinking about understanding?

This must be the insight that the Buddhists cherish: you can't, so don't try. The best you can do is recognize your ultimate limitations and try not to hold too dearly to the sense of yourself as an isolated phenomenon trying to make sense of a universe that is external and distinct from your efforts. Become One, and know that you won't understand but at least you might be content; and not so often be brought to tears by a book on quantum mechanics.

I'm right there with them, baby. I grok. But it's not so easy to bring these instincts under control. At times, I think I can almost do it. I can see a light go on and think the affirmation "yes, it has gone on" or see a bird flying and merely note its passing, being pleased if light or bird expresses a particular beauty or harmony of form and timing. But far more often comes the sudden pain behind the eyes of not knowing—of failing to understand the essential nature of light and electricity, or of being too limited to see how the pattern traced by the bird's wings is dictated by the formula of the universe (from the kinetics of it physiology to the fundamental laws governing mass and acceleration).

It's so hard to make that crucial step away from wanting to possess the laws of reality towards a joyful embrace and acceptance of that Law. To stop knowing and start being. To be as the moon reflected in the pool of water; to realize that the path I have been running wildly to follow can in fact be found merely by standing still.

Britney, eat your heart out: it's the stunning performance debut of Attorney General John Ashcroft! *wild applause*

An office building in California was evacuated, many employees were rushed to the hospital, the terrorist response teams were called in... All because of a bottle of vodka.

"It is really funny that 400 people could get poisoned with one bottle of Russian vodka. It can happen in America only, where people easily become panic-stricken after all sad experience with terrorism, anthrax letters, bombs, etc."

I'm so proud of my country.

But speaking of terrorism, today's Washington Post has an excellent article on Afghanistan, with some surprisingly 'unfiltered' comments from soldiers on the ground. I'll never understand why some boys (and girls) want to grow up and join the military. I know, they were the ones playing with toy guns while I was taking apart my parents' clock radios.

From Central and Eastern Europe today: the Macedonian government is moving ahead with discussion on minority rights for ethnic Albanians. Meanwhile, their trigger-happy interior minister Ljube Boskovski gets a little carried away with a fun new grenade launcher.

For those of you looking for some real estate, why not buy half a Czech town? I hear the skiing is wonderful, and it's a lot cheaper than Aspen. Fewer movie stars, though.

And finally, from the "well, duh" file...


Today is one of those dreary gray days where it's hard to do much of anything. Which is OK, since I don't have to. I do have a second interview at Borders this Saturday, though, so next week might see this bum employed. And I'm waiting to hear from Starbucks as well. No, I'm not endorsing them--but it's right down the road from my apartment and they need some summer help... and I need some extra cash. Don't give me that look. Yes, you. I saw that.

Still, today shouldn't be a total waste. I hereby declare this Laundry Day.
Now where did I put those quarters...

So, on a whim I've been reading about fonts. Yeah, fonts--as in typefaces. I've never really thought about them before, except perhaps noticing that an old book looks "old-fashioned" or that some flyer or webpage is maybe a little hard on the eyes. But it's really fascinating, and far more complicated than I'd expected. There are new typefaces
coming out all the time, some of them modifications on a few "classic" styles that have been around since the 17th century, and sometimes radically new styles. Newspapers and magazines often commission fonts for their own private use, to create a distinctive "look" for their publication. (The Wall Street Journal just did a major typeface redesign. The differences are subtle, but the new fonts were designed from scratch to be more modern but similar to the old ones. And the new font for the stock-market pages (called Retina) is actually really cool. It's designed to be clear at very small typefaces, and the bold-weight letters are no wider than the normal-weight ones. The way the designer kind of truncated the curvy bits on the letters also makes it compress really well. There are names for all these things, but I don't know what they are.) And all the fonts that have been made since people started keeping records are on file, and follow the same copyright rules that any other work does.

So, wow. Neat. And I've been trying to see things like a typographer (?) would, which is also really interesting, because you don't normally really look at a font. You just read the words--the type is almost a throwaway medium.

One thing that surprised me: I've always been kind of creeped out by Newsweek magazine. It's always seemed kind of 'icky' to me, somehow. Turns out they're using a font called Vincent, designed by Matthew Carter, that I really don't like. It mixes little froofy ornaments on some letters with rather severe curved serifs on others. Sometimes you'll have a few words where the sharp serifs grate on each other, and sometimes the froofy things blob together, depending on the sequence of letters. I just think it's ugly--especially on that glossy magazine paper--and it makes reading the magazine an unpleasant experience. Who knew? I never would have picked up on the fact that it was the font I didn't like, since I never would have thought about the font at all, until I started learning about this stuff.

So, yay fontographers! (Or whatever they're called...) The world would be a less interesting place for reading without them.

On M's advice, I've been trying--really trying--to get into Bret Easton Ellis' book The Rules of Attraction. I've tried to read some Ellis before and thought it was awful, but M promised me this one was "accessible". Ha. I suppose it is, if by "accessible" you mean poorly-written, shallow characters whose voices, already weak, are drowned out by an overbearing sense of moralizing on the part of the author. Now, one might say that the characters are supposed to be shallow, that that's the point. After all, the book is a fictional expose of the moral depravity of America's youth in the eighties; it might be expected that the depraved themselves wouldn't be the deepest sorts. But there's a difference between a well-written character with a shallow personality and a character that's so shallowly-written they have no discernible personality at all. The misfits that populate Ellis' book are the latter: nearly identical cut-outs that are little more than mouthpieces for Ellis' "grieving outrage at our spiritual tradition" (LA Times Book Review). This is what makes him "one of the primary inside sources in upper-middle-class America's continuing investigation of what has happened to its children"? (NYT Book Review) Perhaps it does, actually. In truth, the book is more Rush Limbaugh than J.D. Salinger, and more Dr. Laura than anything else. If you're the type of person who thinks Judge Judy is dispensing much-needed justice to a nation led astray, then you'll probably love this book. Otherwise, don't even bother; Ellis is nowhere near as clever a writer as he thinks he is. You won't be missing out on much.