Bursting Neurons

My room smells, looks like a sanitary landfill. Empty styro-cups of McDonald’s Premium Roast Coffee and Hershey’s Cookies and Cream Chocolate drink tetra-packs are scattered around. Nicotine is mixing with Oxygen and other gaseous molecules frantically floating and bumping to each other within the enclosure of my room. Papers, fast-food wrappers and plastics, empty plastic bottles, and all waste stuffs produced by a cramming, stressed and overloaded post-bachelor student (I am not yet in this level) can be found anywhere in my room and not surprisingly are being feasted by cockroaches and mice. And my laundry is there in one corner cocktailing a new smell from perfume and sweat. Trust me, when you happen to visit my room, you will experience chaos in cosmic level.

It’s not really that I don’t have time. It is just that my focus is on somewhere else.

Actually, I am supposed to clean my room today, but for some random reactions in my cortex I decided to do something else… to browse through my “Favorites” archives. I visited different science blogs bookmarked in my archives and I was hooked. My 9 hours spent exploring these blogs and made almost all of my neurons swollen and some ready to burst (including my alveoli due to the Nicotine-heavy air).

I guess after reading these, someone has really a good reason to complain about headaches and exhaustions:

Garrett Lisi’s An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything (PDF)

John Baez’s Website

n-Category Café

And some other blogs listed in CosmicVariance Blog Links.

What the hell are they talking about? I read something about E8 and my brain cells conked out. Suddenly, I have this urge to join them in their discussions, like this one, Back Reaction, but I can’t because I barely know the things that they were discussing. I am attracted by these mathematical equations but I cannot comprehend them. They are in the highest forms that can’t be deciphered by the processes of my brains.

Here’s E8:

And this is the animated version: Quicktime

And what’s that? A cosmic mandala I think. Nah, it’s a geometric presentation of particle interactions of our universe, or in short a visual mathematical (cosmic level in terms of comprehensibility of its equation) presentation of our universe. This is just an attempt to describe how the very components of our universe interacts (that’s only on my understanding, but for detailed description and you are a technical person read Lisi’s paper or read this Backreaction).

Nowadays, physicists are dancing on the line that borders Physics and Pure Mathematics, and doing some stints that are too incomprehensible for all us. I also wondered why I kept on reading these blogs, these papers and these tutorials even I know that I can only comprehend barely 1% of the subject matter. Group theory really piqued by curiosity and now I am dying to know the subject. To be honest, I am too far to reach this level of comprehending this kind of mathematics.

I met the Galois Group in high school when I submitted a project, which is to collect recent developments in mathematics, to my Math teacher and that time I was only studying the Matrix algebra. But I never really understood the essence of that paper about Galois group. On one hand, I met Lie and Abelian Algebras when I was in second year college that was the time also when I spent so many hours understanding the Quantum Mechanical world. I met String that same period also along with Supergravity and Theory of Everything. All of them, I just met them but never had a chance to know them well. From that time until now, that I have abandoned the academic life, I am always haunted by these topics. My mind is grappling to understand the basic and fundamental mechanisms of the universe.

I admit I have always been a jack of all trade (as observed by most of my friends) but never have been a master of something. But I know deep inside of me that my brain was really designed to master one thing, and that’s Mathematics. Now I regret that I wasted 5 years of not enhancing this talent (but I won’t stop here, I still have time to go back). I remember the conversation I had with a friend 3 weeks ago. That conversation really pricked my ego. She, Gwen (who is now a full pledged physicists and just came back from Italy – ICTP), told me that I have to go back. She said, “You need to go back, you are brilliant mathematician and don’t let your talent be wasted.” That word wasted dawned to me as true. I never realized that they were looking up to me as brilliant and here I am wasting this brilliant mind.

Maybe it’s time for me to go back. I need time, 2-3 years more and I will be back. By that time, I can already join the online community of physicists in their discussions. I am thanking Gwen for letting me to realize that I have been a wasted mathematician for years. It’s time for me to be recycled and renewed.

KAY