Episodes of a Curbside Prophet
Watching cars pass you while you're driving is always a tinge annoying, unless you're completely stopped. In that case, it's deeply ironic, for lack of a better phrase.
***
IMHO, physics camp was the best longest time I've had in a while. Maybe peaks of enjoyment before then were higher up for a half hour or day or two, but never sustained for a whole week. It's joy that comes from something universal about nearly completely abandoning and dedicating your life (if only for a time), that takes it and collapses it into one point and one purpose. That you know that you've accomplished something, although you're not quite sure what it is yet, and that you'll probably (hopefully) figure out what it is you've done before you forget.
In the aftermath, this is the loot I've gathered:
a nice medal and certificate (they really are nice),
a TI-89, =D
some physics teaching journals,
quality NASA propaganda,
this really cool fiber-optic LED pen w/ like 7 different colors that I just happened to drop behind the dresser... =/
copious physics notes, problems, and labs (which are correct, for the most part... =})
a few good pictures,
and oodles and oodles of textbooks.
One of them (Krane, Modern Physics) is filled with about two dozen signatures, from people who have chosen (been chosen) for the same purpose of HARD-core physics training. Of these, five are from people who will undergo even more training until the International Physics Olympics, and will probably do their country proud. All of them are names, faces, voices, quirks, physicists, and friends.
I wonder, if doing physics for 10+ hours a day for only a week and half is what it takes to bond and make instant friends, then why are some of the people I've talked to, and suffered school with, for seven years, less so? I think it's something to do with something my roommate from IMSA, Tim Credo, talked about. Tim was a great roommate, and I'd have it no other way.
***
Warning - analogy about to be stretched way past normal elasticity limits.
A chaotic system is a system with little or no predictable behavior. Nevertheless, people have been describing them for about 30 years now. The simplest analogy to a chaotic system in my mind is a good pool player on a very strange shaped pool table. It could be a shamrock, a football, or even a simple oval - as long as there's some spin, some friction, and some contact forces, it's pretty much chaotic, and has fractal behavior.
In my understanding, instead of a fractal solution having periodicity (i.e. repeatability), the fractal solutions themselves are sometimes periodic or similar, depending on different starting conditions. When you change a degree of freedom, you can change the fractal a certain amount, and then after a while it comes back to something different but familiar. Some guy came up with a big important number in the 1980s to determine how long it would take in a certain degree of freedom to change your starting point before you got a fractal solution back that was like what you saw before. That big important number was the same for all degrees of freedom, in any dimension that you could adjust.
Then, in the late 1990s, some guy came out of nowhere, said "multifractals", and made the mathematical universe go nuts. He found fractals that had the periodicity that behaved differently in different dimensions, and so the big important number only worked one dimension at a time.
Okay, so what's the point?
People are chaotic systems themselves obviously. But people in a school have lots in common - they're of about the same age, same country, state, and county, same pressures to fit it and succeed simultaneously, at whatever it is that they do.
But when you release them from their common starting conditions, and see where their paths went, there's not much periodicity, or harmony, really - it's almost all quite random. There's only just enough to find someone that's close enough to you that you can get along with, and if you stick with them long enough, they'll interact and fix each other and all of their chaotic tendencies (with respect to each other) and move along in roughly the same path over the long haul. That's one set of degrees of freedom.
Now take people who've been gathered from all across the country in high school to do physics. These people aren't the same age, aren't from the same place, but the pressures of success are about the same. There's one commonality that makes up for it though, and that's that they love physics, and that they'll be testing their love with lots of physics abuse. =P
Then, when you release them and let them go, they mostly form a very similar set of paths, do about the same things, which makes the periodicity very high. These people can relate to each other much better just because they're in the same boat, and they make tighter bonds. But they don't interact for as long, so there's no telling if they'll drift or stay tight.
Does this make them better friends, the friends from the physics camp, than the friends from the high school?
***
And something else - what does it take to make a commitment? Is ten days of much, too much physics a commitment? What happens after you leave, and decide that you'll be a starving artist or musician?
And are you a physicist, if after ten days you've measured mu (the permeability of free space that makes magnets stick together), g, and Planck's constant, h, and have found the temperature in a star, the mass of a pion, and the way to cool atoms with light and to and even divine the age of the universe, and then left and never touched another physics book or lab, or equation?
***
And something more - what does it take to make a Christian? Is ten years a church-goer and convicted spirit a Christian? What happens after you go out on your own, and decide whether or not Jesus really is risen?
And are you a Christian, if after ten years you've been baptized, worshipped with and led a hundred people scores of times over, and debated with and shared with and witnessed with curious, belligerent, or confused lives, and professed in public your walk with God?
***
Woolsey-Swanson Rule:
People would rather live with a problem they cannot solve than accept a solution they cannot understand...
***
IMHO, physics camp was the best longest time I've had in a while. Maybe peaks of enjoyment before then were higher up for a half hour or day or two, but never sustained for a whole week. It's joy that comes from something universal about nearly completely abandoning and dedicating your life (if only for a time), that takes it and collapses it into one point and one purpose. That you know that you've accomplished something, although you're not quite sure what it is yet, and that you'll probably (hopefully) figure out what it is you've done before you forget.
In the aftermath, this is the loot I've gathered:
a nice medal and certificate (they really are nice),
a TI-89, =D
some physics teaching journals,
quality NASA propaganda,
this really cool fiber-optic LED pen w/ like 7 different colors that I just happened to drop behind the dresser... =/
copious physics notes, problems, and labs (which are correct, for the most part... =})
a few good pictures,
and oodles and oodles of textbooks.
One of them (Krane, Modern Physics) is filled with about two dozen signatures, from people who have chosen (been chosen) for the same purpose of HARD-core physics training. Of these, five are from people who will undergo even more training until the International Physics Olympics, and will probably do their country proud. All of them are names, faces, voices, quirks, physicists, and friends.
I wonder, if doing physics for 10+ hours a day for only a week and half is what it takes to bond and make instant friends, then why are some of the people I've talked to, and suffered school with, for seven years, less so? I think it's something to do with something my roommate from IMSA, Tim Credo, talked about. Tim was a great roommate, and I'd have it no other way.
***
Warning - analogy about to be stretched way past normal elasticity limits.
A chaotic system is a system with little or no predictable behavior. Nevertheless, people have been describing them for about 30 years now. The simplest analogy to a chaotic system in my mind is a good pool player on a very strange shaped pool table. It could be a shamrock, a football, or even a simple oval - as long as there's some spin, some friction, and some contact forces, it's pretty much chaotic, and has fractal behavior.
In my understanding, instead of a fractal solution having periodicity (i.e. repeatability), the fractal solutions themselves are sometimes periodic or similar, depending on different starting conditions. When you change a degree of freedom, you can change the fractal a certain amount, and then after a while it comes back to something different but familiar. Some guy came up with a big important number in the 1980s to determine how long it would take in a certain degree of freedom to change your starting point before you got a fractal solution back that was like what you saw before. That big important number was the same for all degrees of freedom, in any dimension that you could adjust.
Then, in the late 1990s, some guy came out of nowhere, said "multifractals", and made the mathematical universe go nuts. He found fractals that had the periodicity that behaved differently in different dimensions, and so the big important number only worked one dimension at a time.
Okay, so what's the point?
People are chaotic systems themselves obviously. But people in a school have lots in common - they're of about the same age, same country, state, and county, same pressures to fit it and succeed simultaneously, at whatever it is that they do.
But when you release them from their common starting conditions, and see where their paths went, there's not much periodicity, or harmony, really - it's almost all quite random. There's only just enough to find someone that's close enough to you that you can get along with, and if you stick with them long enough, they'll interact and fix each other and all of their chaotic tendencies (with respect to each other) and move along in roughly the same path over the long haul. That's one set of degrees of freedom.
Now take people who've been gathered from all across the country in high school to do physics. These people aren't the same age, aren't from the same place, but the pressures of success are about the same. There's one commonality that makes up for it though, and that's that they love physics, and that they'll be testing their love with lots of physics abuse. =P
Then, when you release them and let them go, they mostly form a very similar set of paths, do about the same things, which makes the periodicity very high. These people can relate to each other much better just because they're in the same boat, and they make tighter bonds. But they don't interact for as long, so there's no telling if they'll drift or stay tight.
Does this make them better friends, the friends from the physics camp, than the friends from the high school?
***
And something else - what does it take to make a commitment? Is ten days of much, too much physics a commitment? What happens after you leave, and decide that you'll be a starving artist or musician?
And are you a physicist, if after ten days you've measured mu (the permeability of free space that makes magnets stick together), g, and Planck's constant, h, and have found the temperature in a star, the mass of a pion, and the way to cool atoms with light and to and even divine the age of the universe, and then left and never touched another physics book or lab, or equation?
***
And something more - what does it take to make a Christian? Is ten years a church-goer and convicted spirit a Christian? What happens after you go out on your own, and decide whether or not Jesus really is risen?
And are you a Christian, if after ten years you've been baptized, worshipped with and led a hundred people scores of times over, and debated with and shared with and witnessed with curious, belligerent, or confused lives, and professed in public your walk with God?
***
Woolsey-Swanson Rule:
People would rather live with a problem they cannot solve than accept a solution they cannot understand...