Today is a Friday. I wake up, suddenly remembering that I had procrastinated my particle physics assignment that was due at 10 AM. Whoops. Not a great start. But procrastinating is ordinary... right? Everyone does it to some extent - intentionally or not - and must deal with the consequences. For me, it meant busting out a few properties of the Dirac equation in about two hours.
But I got it done and hurried my way off to class to turn it in. There we started talking about something called "Bilinear Covariants". We defined something called Ψ that solved our equation nicely and its properties for a while. Hey, look! A greek letter! A symbol used to denote a sound that helped tell stories over and over -- the same stories we've been looking at in Ovid. It shows up everywhere...
After particle physics, I have a two-hour break before Mythologies, so I sit down and start working on some homework. My friend Laura comes and sits down next to me, doing the crossword. Soon I forget about my homework and am working on it with her. The structures of those puzzles are incredible. How does someone take twenty-six letters, arranging them time and time again on a grid and somehow have words that make complete sense? That's the beauty of language, I suppose: So many patterns, so many meanings.
Of course, in Mythologies, Frederick Turner was visiting. That alone was more than enough to make this day extraordinary. I particularly enjoyed him talking about cosmology and the need for it in epics. I think it's incredible how he was able to build bridges for us we might never had imagined; science to mythology to epic and back again.
From that, I had to go to my thermodynamics class. Back to the numbers. Sigh.
Today we were talking about the partition function. This is a magical function where if you know what it is (Z) you know everything you ever need to know about the system. It was about drawing connections between this mathematical construct Z and real, measurable things. Again, it was all about making bridges where none had existed before.
That's the amazing thing about education. You can use it to memorize fact after fact, but the really good classes are the ones that have you make connections between things you already and know and use that to discern something about the world. That has been true of all of my classes this semester, and for most of them throughout college. It's been a great four years.
That night was the "Shout Across Time" event for Celebrating Einstein. It was a huge project that brought together artists, physicsists, musicians, architects, dancers... pretty much every discipline you can think of. This outreach event was geared towards the layman, towards kids even.
It started with a danced lecture on gravitational waves; someone told us about Einstein and his theories as the dancers visualized the words on stage, forming elastic sheets and interferometers with their bodies.
Afte that, the dancers changed and performed a piece with a Cirque de Soleil trained aerialist; she spun and spun as the other dancers whirled around her, a black whole dragging along an accretion disk. It was really quite incredible.
Then, there was a live interview with Jim Gates, an incredible theoretical physicist whose job is, and I quote, "to make stuff up." I think he views his job much as a novelist or composer, only instead of adhering to the rules of language or music theory, he makes stuff up using the language of mathematics. I think that's an incredible way to think of physicists, and it was definitely something I'd never thought of before.
Finally, there was a film on Einstein and gravitational waves, interweaving ideas of time, math, technology, and, of course, the cosmos and black holes.
I was spellbound by the entire night, and couldn't wait to come back on Saturday and see it all again.
Today... was definitely not ordinary. I met Frederick Turner. I spent some quality time with friends. I procrastinated. I watched an artistic event about scientific concepts. I made connections.
It was a day I will not soon forget.
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