Prerna > Recent Status Updates

Doubtless these are inconsequential perplexities. Still, inconsequential perplexities have now and again been known to become the fundamental mood of existence, one suspects.

From time to time
mothers in the wild
devour their young,
an appetite born of
pure, bright need.
Occasionally,
mothers from ordinary
homes, much like our
own, feed on the viscid
shame their daughters
are forced to secrete
from glands formed
in the favor of men.

Everything I searched for in life, I gave up precisely because I had to search for it.

The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.

Train read, travel read.

I am indefectibly myself, and it is in this that I am mad: I am mad because I consist.

I am like those children who take a clock apart in order to find out what time is.

What I hide by my language, my body utters.

Full disclosure - although I'd been wanting to read this book since forever, a friend only gifted me a copy because it has '69' on its cover.

It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.

I came to theory because I was hurting— the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend— to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.

SAME!!

If I have to wait, I read; I wake up in the night, I feel along the shelf for a book. Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head.

Shaking thoughts of her, I wonder—may be
Life is finally simple: breathe in, breathe out.
Wind biting at the mouth, hunger
Gnawing in the gut, feet folding fast
The furrowed snow, cold and weary,
A body trudges home.

This obviously not a book of poetry, it's a dense theory book that I've been losing my mind over. But this is too beautiful to keep to myself.

Adding this update solely so that I can apparently be the first person to quote someone quoting someone quoting himself quoting someone. But since the allowed number of characters here is too little to add the actual quote, I'm gonna do it in the comment section.

If you’re a hard-nosed layperson and your knowledge about physics was based on Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe—not to pick on Brian—but you could get away with the idea that physicists are just making shit up. This is unfortunate because it’s far away from reality, the reality of a decent, honest physicist.

Lol.

I am not a single and passing being. My life is not a bright spark like that on the surface of a diamond. I go beneath ground tortuously, as if a warder carried a lamp from cell to cell. My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day.

To know a thing does not always enable us to prevent it, but at least the things we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, and this gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.

I cannot tell you if life is this or that. I am going to push out into the heterogeneous crowd. I am going to be buffeted; to be flung up, and flung down, among men, like a ship on the sea.

Who on earth is Galen and why am I only hearing of him now?

The quarks have an additional type of polarization that is not related to geometry. The idiot physicists, unable to come with any wonderful Greek words anymore, call this type of polarization by the unfortunate name of "color," which has nothing to do with color in the normal sense.

Sometimes I believe that this is the colonizer’s true legacy: an inability to look at other humans as being capable of, and deserving of, fluidity—to flow as free as a river while simultaneously being as self-possessed as the ocean.

But this kind of fire didn’t come from anger. It came from Bell’s deep moral convictions about the integrity of science, the same kind of moral convictions that had led him to become a vegetarian decades earlier. While the Copenhagen interpretation was unwilling to grapple with the measurement problem, Bell was unwilling not to grapple with it..

Have I mentioned that I am absolutely in love with Bell?

‘Hinduism is a religion, Hindutva is an ideology for political mobilization’, Romila Thapar contends. She writes: ‘Hinduism is a mosaic of belief systems, some linked, others not. Hindutva has the characteristics of a sect that reformulates selected beliefs to create in this case a socio-political organisation with an attempt at ideological coherence’.

The first targets of what we could today call 'queerphobic queer cleansing’ were the British themselves, beginning with the Imperial Army. For instance, as Ballhatchet notes, British administrators officially organised an Indian female prostitution apparatus to prevent same-sex acts between British soldiers. They preferred that British men engage in interracial extra-marital heterosex instead of intra-racial homosex.

I finally got through chapter 3! And personally, this is a cause for celebration because I was worried about David Harvey's warning that chapter 3 is where most people who try to read Capital give up. (Yes, I didn't forget about this book, I've just been slogging through.) Hopefully, I can finish volume 1 by the end of the year and then flex about it for a decade.

'I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics’, said the celebrated American Nobel laureate Richard Feynman in 1965, ten years after Einstein’s death. With the Copenhagen interpretation as firmly established as the quantum orthodoxy as any papal edict issued from Rome, most physicists simply followed Feynman’s advice.

However, what was the medium through which an electron wave travelled? The question was akin to asking what does the wave function in Schrödinger’s wave equation represent? In the summer of 1926 a witty little ditty summed up the situation that confronted Schrödinger and his colleagues:


Erwin with his psi can do
Calculations quite a few.
But one thing has not been seen:
Just what does psi really mean?

Lol.

‘Physics at the moment is again very muddled; in any case, for me it is too complicated, and I wish I were a film comedian or something of that sort and had never heard anything about physics’, wrote Pauli in May 1925, some six months after discovering the exclusion principle.

In 1924, Einstein was still struggling to accept what he had unearthed: ‘I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will, not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction. In that case, I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming-house, than a physicist.’

The fruit of fear is ripening. And I see you gather it. You are the harvester. All that we fear to know, you have seen, you have known: exile, shame, pain, the roof and walls of the world fallen, the mother dead in misery, the children untaught, uncherished. . . . This is a new time for the world: a bad time. And you have suffered it all. You have gone farthest.

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward.