Skip to main content

For too long, in the coming.

*Reserved for lame excuses for not having blogged for like 8 ass-butt months.*

Yes, with that out of the way, I should mention that an aimless Saturday evening,a day before the TOEFL can be encouraging to revive a long -dead and rotting blog.


I have been occupied with 3 rather interesting books for the past couple of days. Actually one of them has tried to keep me occupied for over a month now. Needless to say, it hasn't done a very good job of it. I borrowed 'The Constants of Nature' by John.D.Barrow from a friend(link serves as cheap thrill to a blogging noobie as well as publicity to namma Gullu's blog) of mine. The author - a research professor in applied mathematics with an obvious passion for astronomy tries to figure out the deeper meaning of the constants that arise in nature, if they ever exist. The book makes for some real heavy reading and this has been the major reason why I haven't come around to finishing it.

Anyway, the other two that have occupied most of yesterday and today are 'Glimpses of World History' by Jawaharlal Nehru and 'Gödel, Escher,Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid' by Douglas R Hofstadter. The former, as most would know is a compilation of a series of letters that the Pandit wrote to his daughter, Indira Gandhi over 30 months from jail. Nehru does full justice to his title, displaying a stunning grasp of the past and present affairs of the world, with minimal references while in immurement. The other book is what I want to write about in this blog.

Yes, it might be premature to write about a book (especially this huge one) only after reading it only for 2 days. But that only strengthens the case for it. In just a couple of days, the book has had a really strong hold over me. In the words of the publisher , the book is "A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll". The book actually in a some way till now has tried to address what the author calls 'Strange Loops' that he thinks occurs everyday. Basically, he is trying to address the reason why a set of apparently meaningless symbols can combine together to form meaning, just like how ultimately lifeless particles can come together to form life. He attributes this to a strange kind of loopiness whereby the particles become aware of themselves. (At least that is just one of the many things I am guessing the author is getting at).

The book begins with a descriptions of people in the title :
Gödel was a famous logician in the beginning of the twentieth century, Escher a famous Dutch graphic artist and Bach - the immensely famous German composer in the early to mid 18th century. Each of these people in some form, displayed through their works - in mathematics, art and music respectively how this enigmatic idea of "Strange Loops" can come about.

Although the material can get tiring and formidable at times, the satisfaction of having understood, at least in part what such an impressive author says , is great.
Do read the book or at least what is purports to explain. I am sure it is in someway related to your boring Sunday musing, "What is life? What is consciousness"........

Comments

Vikram said…
Try and get the third book you mentioned (Gödel, Escher,Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid) to college. I've been wanting to read it for a while now...
Vikram said…
And best of luck for TOEFL

Popular posts from this blog

Whatever happened to Learning

A post on similar lines was intended for quite some time, but I could never really get myself to putting it down. Before entering NITK for a degree in Electrical Engineering, there was no clear idea as to what I wanted to do and what I needed to do. Like anyone else, most of the learning that happened involved gigantic tomes of pointless reactions and formulae. After all, it was sacrilege to not enrol yourself to a prestigious JEE coaching place. What was all the more disappointingly ironic was the fact that some of the finest ideas of science and mathematics were being introduced during this period, including calculus, linear algebra and quantum theory and the only thing that mattered was how an MCQ could be posed and what could be the best possible way to go about answering it. The most prime of time was lost in such meaningless exercises. So, for me the usual typical story followed - an almost worthless JEE rank and I had to 'compromise' with an EE seat at NITK Surathkal. Ah

Of Nikola's Vision

If magnetic lines circulate time varying electric currents, should I not say magnets are bunches of electric current thrown to distort Serenity. What I learn today is this - vector fields are of two kinds - one called solenoidal from the greek word for pipe-shaped and the other called irrotational field which means it is making itself to be represented as a dot product with any scalar field phi. We see these kind of measurements for example on images for analysis and processing and such. The solenoidal or if I may, the rotational fields are those which can be represented as a dot product with a Vector Potential A, such that the field v can be written as v = del X A. Therefore, the dot with a cross product is bound to be zero too. This seems to be the foundations for the need for differential calculas. We are highly indebted to Newton/Laplace for Calculas for they sat on shoulders of Giants then and today we on them! Coming back to Electromagnetism, Magnetic field lines compose are sole

One Man's Dream

Ever since the advent of Wikipedia, it's variants and more importantly the idea of Web 2.5ing, there was always this sub-conscious effort from my side to be relevant in the accumulation of the most obscure of facts about the most obscure of places and people. Not only has my active participation been a rather interesting phenomenon, but the idea of a person who I would never have even imagined that I would meet, hooks up and we end up spending hours fighting virtual Mafia wars, the concept kind of starts getting a little trippy. These phenomena no doubt exhibit characteristics that are so profoundly impacted by time - just like the supposed maturity of a person or the understanding of the world or the more and more compact stuffing of switches and devices in a tenth of a micron square. But this particular aim of 'world knowledge' and a 'single consciousness' no longer begs but commands our attention as more and more rapid progress is being made in all fields concern