Friday, December 21, 2007

Confessions and other things

a) I ran away from the department yesterday ridiculously early so as to avoid running into my paymaster and having to explain to him why he still has not got the first draft of a paper we are writing together.

b) The reason I am not able to write the paper is because I have a “Yeah, so what?” reaction to the results in the paper. He is excited about them though.

c) This tells me that I am unable to get excited by inherently non-mechanistic theories (the ones where the mathematics does not really reveal why something is happening and you have to answer the why part with words). This is a very disturbing revelation for a theoretical physicist primarily interested in emergent phenomena.

d) I got a new comment on my post on elastomers at SC. To be able to respond to the comment, I reread the post as I had forgotten what I had said in it. I realized I like rereading what I have written. So I went and read “the hugely popular for mysterious reasons “Micelles and Vesicles post””. Is this normal? To like rereading one’s own posts?

e) Also, blogging break coming up. Going to NYC for a few days of what is hoped will be fun.

And on a completely different note, I came across this “gives you unjustifiable patriotic goose bumps” video from Lead India. Also gives me an opportunity to test iShare (trying to be the youtube of India?) Do complain if it does not work here or in your feedreader so I will know if there are problems.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

a) I think not being excited or not depends just on the mental make-up of the person. The more emotionally bent a person is, the more he/she likes non-mechanistic theories, while people who live and die by logic alone like mechanistic theories! (Not that non-mechanistic theories are illogical). And not that anything is wrong with it. Eventually everything has to be mechanistically explained (for Theoretical Physicists) atleast phenomenologically otherwise, its just a nice Chandamama story.

b)I think you like rereading mainly to recapitualte, but there might be a slight sense of happiness coming from deep within that you have infact written something good and weren't really appreciated. You aren't expecting a Nobel prize, are you?

Have fun at NYC!

CuriousCat said...

Dear Anonymous : About mechanistic theories and such : Any theory that appears mechanistic is just an illusion. Physics at the end of the day is not about mechanisms at all but about mathematical modeling that gives you some predictive power ad some unification of otherwise apparently disparate things. That is the truth. And so taking mechanisms seriously is detrimental for mental health!

b) Ok, I do not know what you are saying exactly. You seem to be suggesting that I am indulging in "patting my own back". I hope that is not the case...but who can say?

c) South park- boy mongoose....: may be they look similar.

Anonymous said...

I agree that Physics at the end of the day is not about mechanisms or stories at all. But that is from a hard core theoretical physicists point of view. There are infact large nos. of non-theory people and ofcourse the laymen, who wud only want to know just the story. Yeah, they should probably keep in mind that the mechanisms aren't to be taken too seriously indeed, but hey, it keeps them happy!