Wednesday, May 08, 2002 Nothing much happened today. I woke up really late and I'm feeling a little disoriented. It's almost 4:30 in the afternoon and I don't have any things that I have to do today, which makes me feel strangely unaccomplished. I feel like I'm tweedling my thumbs waiting for something to happen.. but no such luck I guess.
I am fiddling around with the idea that man is always trying to find a new project to pursue. I was reading this book that Michelle "inspired" me to get: Hyperspace by Michio Kaku. I think basically it's a history of physics from Newton to the Superstring Theory. It's really cool; a light read that is not light-weight. But you realise that history (for physics at least I guess) spins off similar scenarios that always paint someone trying to chase after the "impossible." For example, Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life, desparately searching for the "Theory of Everything." Now, physicists seem to have come up with the best contender for that title and that is the "Superstring Theory." I don't think I understand the physics part of it but I think Kaku is very helpful in dishing out analogies to help us common layman to visualise exactly what the project of physics is. I feel a little threatened when I read the book because I realise that physics' quest for the "Theory of Everything" is perhaps an elegant form of reduction. What I mean is that Physics seem to want to fit everything in the world into a model. But what will we do AFTER that? is something that I really want to know. Do we go on with our lives as before? Or will the world be a place where "all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under tha last dust?" (Beckett, Endgame). Of course what I think that means is that the world will just be dead, without consciousness. Maybe not physically but certainly metaphorically, not unlike the horrible mechanic universe painted by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground.

posted by Sharon K at 1:32 am