Just a place to jot down my musings.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Strings, branes, and all that

 I came across a few articles today on Plus, an online mathematics magazine, which presented some of the basics of theoretical physics—string theory and M-branes in particular—in a simple, accessible way. If you’re interested, a good way to do this would be to start “From Newton to Einstein and beyond” and to try “Tying it all up” before you “Meet the mother theory”. 


Of course, the hard math underlying all these theories really is essential if you want to grok this stuff. I would recommend Sir Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, about two-thirds of which is spent in actually explaining the math behind such things as general relativity. Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time that his editor warned him that every equation he put in would scare away half of his readers. By this metric, Sir Roger’s editor was probably content to have an audience of five. Including himself. (I’ve worked through less than a third of the book so far!) The Road to Reality tries to cover, quite literally, everything. Reading it will do to your mind what diving into a P90X training program will do to an obese Indian bureaucrat’s body.



Sunday, April 1, 2012

If you're stuck on a problem

This is a profound statement by Robert Pirsig, from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.


Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shirazghazal of Hafez into florid English, Sir William Jones, the philologist and Sanskrit scholar and polyglot extraordinaire, transformed the following couplet:

غزل گفتی و در سفتی بیا و خوش بخوان حافظ

که بر نظم تو افشاند فلک عقد ثریا را


into:

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung.

The "translation" is terribly inaccurate, but worse, the phrase is a gross misrepresentation of the highly structured organization of Persian poetry. Regardless, I picked it as the name of my blog for a number of reasons: 
1) I don't expect the ordering of my posts to follow any rhyme or reason
2) Since "at random strung" is a rather meaningless phrase, I decided to go with the longer but more pompous "pearls at random strung". I rest assured that my readers are unlikely to deduce from this an effort on my part to arrogate some of Hafez's peerless brilliance!

About Me

My photo
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”