Eureka!

(WARNING: This article is messy. Spur of the moment writing, so I did not have much time to copyread.. :D)

Sometimes I wonder if my world is normal, just like Calvin, asking his mom if he is a special child or not. Every time I ask my friends if I am weird or not, they will just throw me a grin, a cold smile, or worst, a silence. Maybe I am indeed weird. Some says I am intelligent but other says I am just trying to be someone. Sometimes I think I just lost my sense of reality for I tend to slumber, preparing myself to embark a wonderful journey to lalaland.

At this moment I am looking at the engraved “Eureka” word on a wood piece attached to my string bracelet. What the hell is Eureka and why the hell I am wearing this bracelet! Did I do something remarkable? Maybe I just like Colin Fergusson of Eureka TV series.

Now my mind is warped in some dimensions and I am thinking of crazy things. I am trying to recall the topic I am supposed to write today. For some unknown reason I can’t pin point which one I am planning to write. My mind is wandering around International Space Station, then to M31, then to the Competency Assessment of my team, and then to some unknown realms of my imagination. Aha! I remember it now. I will be writing about the Midnight Children, not the book written by Salman Rushdie.

What about the Midnight Children?

Few days ago, I mentioned to my friend that our generation is very lucky and I call our generation as the midnight children, embarking to the dawn of digital society of digital civilization. We grew up in the transition period of everything, from analog to digital, from war-torn to somewhat stable, from localized capitalization to emerging globalization, from the casual weather observation to the onset of global warming awareness, from the environment dangerous economic policy to conservation policies. We were born in the period when everything was slowly moving to some levels. Our generation is lucky to observe the transformation of analog telephone to digital telephone to beeper, to mobile phone. We have been witness to the exponential evolution of mobile phones. If you have not experienced the joystick of Nintendo and haven’t enjoyed the Xbox, Wii or PS3, then I guess you can claim that you belong to our generation.

One phenomenal event that we witnessed is the conversation of our analog world to digital world, as catalyzed by the existence of internet or information technologies. We have seen bandy clock cards been replaced by biometrics, from walkman to discman to iPod, from writing on a simple journal to blogging, from broadsheet to e-news, from mail to e-mail to internet messenger, from betamax to VHS to DVD to HD, from hard bound encyclopedia to wikipedia, from paper notebook to electronic notebook. Technology transformation happened so fast that we could not notice anymore the transition of things we used to know to new things we have to know. The transformation is so fast that we have been caught by it that we no longer remember the simple joys we can derive from the analog world. Do you still feel the thrill of waiting on the telephone for your special someone to call? Do you still worry if you can’t call home when you are caught somewhere? Do you still understand the romance of a pay phone, the satisfaction after writing on a lined sheet of your journal/notebook, the fun of answering the questions of someone slambook (now replaced by Facebook and Friendster), the rewarding wait of buying the newly released album?

As everything changes so fast, everyone is becoming impatient. Things, goods and delight should be delivered on time with no allowable unit of delay. And we, who were born in the waning period of analog and infant period of digital, have witnessed the gentle creeping of the dawn of digital life in human society. Because of this, I believe it is just right to say that those who were born in the late 70’s, the whole 80’s and early 90’s are the midnight children.

If we relate this to the actual clock, I can say that we were born at exactly 00:00:01 AM and now we are at 00:30:00 AM. The day of the digital world has yet to come. We have not yet entered its glorious period. I would say by 2090-2100 we have already reached the golden age of the digital world. Electrons, they were discovered decades before we entered the digital world, and super/semiconductors drove us to embark the wonderful landscape of digital future.

For me we are the First Wave Generation of digital world and as we go on living we will be witnessing the births of the succeeding generations. What will happen when we end the digital era? I guess we will be entering a new age again and I believe we cannot live that long to see the next era, the Subspace Generation.

Today if we are using electrons to run almost all of our technology, the emerging technologies of the next era will be utilizing subspace particles or even space-time itself. This era will dawn roughly by 2110-2150.

I hope cryogenic will be mastered before I die because I want to witness the dawn of Subspace Era. This time maybe human society is starting to understand the use of holographic principle, of holographic technology, the warp drives, of Solar systems energy, of teleportation and neural networks (including the programming of dreams) and some other beyond reality (of the moment) technologies.

If we have ISS now, I doubt that we cannot achieve all of these.

Now I am going crazy and my mind is ready to fly to neverland.

I am one of the Midnight Children.

Of Alibata Card Reading and PhD Comics

Bow Tie Model of the internet links directed me to a unique humorous website for graduate students, the PhD Comics: Post Avant-Garde Limmericks. Browsing through several previous posts of the website, at first I was grinning while reading through the comics. After few pages, a small hint of longing crept within my body, a longing that I had never felt for years. I am not sad or dismayed. I am not even worried. But there is something I miss, something that I have not been doing for years, after I left the university five years ago.

I miss doing mathematical and physical problems. I miss wondering about the eventuality of different scenarios when applied to certain physical equations. I miss the integral, the ket-bra notation, the gravitational constant, matrix of numbers and set/groups of objects. All of these, I miss them and I have been missing them for years. I long for the days when I was just inside my room in the dormitory scribbling x’s and y’s with some mathematical signs and wrestling with the phenomena of the physical universe waiting to be defeated.

It was not the PhD Comics that instilled this longing of my neglected passion. Francis Paraan’s Friendster profile, the site where I clicked the link of PhD Comics, brought back this interest, this desire, this passion to life and now is asking me to go back, demanding me some answers why I abandoned everything just for some joys residing in a very unstable area of my space-time. He is taking his PhD now and here I am still trying to find my path again to finish my bachelor’s degree.

I am not sad. In fact, I am happy, not because I just want to be happy, but because I have recognized the fact that this passion will haunt me forever, that I have no other recourse but to go back and pursue this interest. This interest for physics and math will surely bring me long-term happiness.

I took a good mug of coffee after browsing the several websites, FP of Francis Paraan, the Physics Forums, paper authors of iprintweb.org and my blog site. Sipped the good liquid caffeine and contemplated on the sum-of-all-histories of my life. Where am I now? What is the probability that I can still make it? Will my path really proceed to the eventual point where I can see the materialization of my childhood dreams? Will I emerge victorious against the scheming of my fate?

Deep inside me, I believe I will make it and I will emerge victorious. However, for me to make this probability an event I need to work hard and I have to bring back my old self. Only through another five years of immersion in the world of numbers and equations can bring me back to my right path. Getting back to the academe is the only way for me to find the door leading to my real joy.

Last night I consulted an Alibata card reader in one of the booths in UP Fair and he reminded me of “Prudence” and “Foresight.” Those nine cards, read as Da-I-Wa, Nga-Ta-Ba and Ha-O-Ga, as explained by reader are about Patience, Time, and my eventual arrival to the desire of my heart. I was only thinking of two things when I had the reading, the desires of my heart, my love to my special someone and my love for math and physics. These two desires indeed need time and patience. It doesn’t mean that I put my hopes to the reading, but it only confirms the state of my heart and mind. Before I had the reading I already knew that there is still have hope, that things will be better soon. One thing, the card reader assured me that I will soon arrive to the right place, by saying that my goals had been blown away by the wind but they will eventually return to their right places. That assurance put my faith forward, that soon I will be back in the world I used to know.

Patience, prudence, time, and hope, I need all of these. It doesn’t mean I will wait for Fate to drop that package of my dreams infront of me. Instead, I have to start working and patiently and prudently trod my way towards my right destination. I know it will be a tumultuous journey but this is the only way to get true happiness that I have been depriving myself for years.

I can say, today, my mind is clear and I have no other goal but to go back to the Academe. The browsing through web and the Alibata reader awakened my inner self. I believe I have something to give to the world that tomorrow is a day of Hope.

I have to remind myself every now and then of this point of affirmation.

-kay