Analytic Cravings

About the site’s writer

Name: Vyaas Gururajan

Occupation: Perishing PhD student Postdoc

Preoccupation: Pondering lifestyle choices in light of the amazing descriptions of Nature proffered by Boltzmann ^{[A] [A]} To me, contemplating the relationship of note to song, citizen to society, axiom to theorem, word to poem, and all such associations, induces dilated pupils and intense slackjaw. In Physics - my preferred course in feeling the Universe - one gets to examine microscopic (part) and macroscopic (whole) theories and the philosophical glue that binds them. The first of such adhesives was due to Boltzmann., Einstein ^{[B] [B]} Einstein was the required outsider to the box of Physics:

If we wish to describe the motion of a material point, we give the values of its coordinates as functions of the time. Now we must bear carefully in mind that a mathematical description of this kind has no physical meaning unless we are quite clear as to what we understand by “time”. We have to take into account that all our judgments in which time plays a part are always judgments of simultaneous events. If, for instance, I say, “That train arrives here at 7 o’clock I mean something like this: The pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.”

It might appear possible to overcome all the difficulties attending the definition of “time” by substituting “the position of the small hand of my watch” for “time”. And in fact such a definition is satisfactory when we are concerned with defining a time exclusively for the place where the watch is located; but it is no longer satisfactory when we have to connect in time series of events occurring at different places, or - what comes to the same thing - to evaluate the times of events occurring at places remote from the watch.

, and Feynman ^{[C] [C]} Every one of Feynman’s inimitable lectures on Physics has revealed to me yet another dimension of Beauty in (of?) our Universe. When reading him, I feel a calm enlightening. It’s the sincerity in his voice; he always asked deceptively simple questions and challenged us to do the same! His work in uniting Hamilton’s & Jacobi’s optical interpretation of Particle Mechanics with Schroedinger’s & deBroglie’s ideas on Wave mechanics by showing that both were a consequence of the enigmatic Principle of Least Action is one of the most exciting intellectual adventures (read as raging philosophical boners) in the history of Science . His Messenger Lectures are a constant source of inspiration to me and countless others., the detailed and prophetic exposition of Capital by Karl Marx ^{[D] [D]} Capitalism has managed to hermetically seal itself from critical reform. We live in a world where the following questions recieve more admonition than attention:

1. If Capitalism thrives on greed, are the culturally codified cliches on the Greed-vil affiliation false?
2. Why do we go out of our way to protect the interests of businessmen by granting them intellectual property, political power, financial clemency, and social status as role-models while poor laborers (farmers, miners, fishermen, cab drivers, mechanics, carpenters, etc.) are villified for complaining, protesting, and unionizing?
3. If Capitalism guarantees so called booms and busts, it also guarantees a never diminishing reserve army of unemployed people. This endows capitalists with the obscene power of deciding the minimum wage and ultimately the poverty line. Also, workers are disenfranchised; they can’t own the fruits of their labor, the means of production, the intellectual permissions to affect change, etc.. Is Capitalism simply a neo-imperialism?

The automatic reluctance of citizens to engage seriously with these questions makes me wonder if they are prescribing an ignorance-is-bliss pill or simply reacting in any way fitting of someone who benefits from the tenets of Capitalism. In either case, the principles of equality and justice aren’t permissive to fickle rationalizations. Our pursuit for Truth requires that we abandon to a large degree our longing to "imagine" a different fairer world. Rather, by seeing the world for what it is, i.e. letting our thoughts reflect our material surroundings and not the other way around, we will allow ourselves the objectivity to grapple with our current system of economy. It is this materialism, injected with dialectic i.e. identifying contradiction, honestly resolving it, identifying its resulting contradiction, honestly resolving that and so on and so on, that is the mode of inquiry in Marx’s multi-volume Capital (Volume I). Marx reveals to us Capitalism’s metabolism, its defense mechanisms, its religious institutionalization, and its apologist’s weakest points. Maybe Communism will prove to be a tough sell (although it has never been realized the way Marx had outlined, not even closely), Marx’s critique of Capitalism remains invaluable. I must direct a good deal of gratitude towards David Harvey for making Marx accessible to my generation., the soulful renditions of Jazz by Bill Evans ^{[E] [E]}

In my most emotionally tired moments, when the stretch marks of existence widen, I listen to the soothing tunes of Bill Evans.

, the method of electro-shock-therapy-through-comedy pioneered by George Carlin ^{[F] [F]}

Such was opacity of the bubble I was reared in, that my first exposure to George Carlin made me go, "Wait! You can say that? You can think that?".

, the disturbing-of-comfortable-and-comforting-of-disturbed agenda of humanistic literature exemplified by David Foster Wallace ^{[G] [G]}

Maybe it’s the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete.

- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

, the Kantian imperatives practiced and preached by Richard Stallman re computers ^{[H] [H]} Programs make hardware do things. It is not at all batshit to assume that users should control programs and not the other way around. The syllogism goes: "if programs are written by people, and these programs control the user, then effectively people control users." That a computer can automatically download software through a backdoor without a user’s permission, that a user cannot modify or even inspect what a program is really executing, that certain hardware refuses to work unless it is fed proprietary software, that a user’s data is collected and surveyed without consent, that a software patent can secure for its owner the power to take away people’s rights to discover and implement solutions to computational problems themselves (this personally hurts more thant anything else) are all instances of gross encroachments on our liberty. It is also highly undemocratic and antisocial as it disenfranchises the Many and empowers the Few. Free Software, Richard Stallman submits, is ethical as it empowers all users and promotes a culture of sharing. To say that such a world cannot exist is naked denial. The movement to develop, distribute, and curate free software (free as in Freedom and not free as in free beer), has gained critical mass! Stallman has inspired me, and many others, to take the challenging yet (hence?) exciting choice of writing and using free software! See The Essays of Richard Stallman (PDF)., and the enigmatic effectiveness and spellbinding metaphysical sanctuary provided by Mathematics ^{[I] [I]} or unreasonably effective as Eugene Wigner would have it..

Most Troubling Observation:

In a time so rich in reflection and so devoted to raisonnement as our own, he must be a poor creature who cannot advance a good ground for everything, even for what is worst and most depraved. Everything in the world that has become corrupt, has had good ground for its corruption. - Hegel, Logic, para. 121

Psychological ailment: Currently succumbing to Bullshit Induced Aphasia, an apparently incurable disease wherein the subject suffers the violent disemboweling of his senses upon hearing the sophistry of fatalists and teleologists through one ear and the drone of solipsists and nihilists through the other, resulting in a mental state of spaz-unto-death. What the subject looks like on the outside can only be left to one’s imagination.

Favorite theorem:

If the functional

$$J=\int_{a}^{b}L(t,q^{\mu},\dot{q}^{\mu})dt$$

is an extremal, and if under the infinitesimal transformation

$$t'=r+\epsilon\tau+...$$

$$q^{\mu}=q^{\mu}+\epsilon\zeta^{\mu}+...$$

the functional is invariant according to the definition (following the inhomogeneous case)

$$L'\frac{dt'}{dt}-L=\epsilon\frac{dF}{dt}+O(\epsilon^{s})$$

where $s<1$, then the following conservation law holds:

$$p_{\mu}\zeta^{\mu}-H\tau-F=const.$$

This is Noether’s theorem, arguably the sexiest in all of Physics! In English words, it says this: When you can write an extremum principle, as the principle of least action, for some phenomenon in Nature, and if you can locate a symmetry, as the homogeniety of space or of time, you will arrive at a conservation law, as the one for momentum or energy. When confronted by the thought of death, I take solace in the fact that I have at least beheld this theorem! To catch such a panoramic glimpse of Natural Structure while remaining emotionally subdued is a goddamn challenge of the highest order!

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