Unedited notes on gravity, etc.

Unedited notes on gravity, etc. [Tonight I worked on a problem set in General Relativity until 4 AM and walked home under soft, acidic streetlights to an empty house with shadows peeling off like blue paint. In the sleep-killing luminosity of a laptop display I searched for comfort amidst the suburban silence of post-midnight residential Cambridge and instead found a page of half-finished notes wrung from my brain during the last two weeks, mostly typed at within 4 minutes of entering slumberland. Reproduced as follows with sporadic punctuation intact.] consciousness at the scale of gravity, if neurons could tune to the fine geometric structure of space and time science is nothing but an extended frame of reference. the human mind imposes its own coordinate system upon the fluid topology of our perception, gingerly constructing a set of logical principles as its basis vectors. thoughts have mass, carve ripples into spacetime each entry of transformed tensor is a multiple of the determinant of a matrix whose rows are the derivatives of the old coordinates with respect to the new coordinates aware of the slowing of time due to the ripples on a river, falling leaves, the mass of flowers in spring. gravity is a pen with which mass writes on the pages of spacetime. science adapts experience to sentience the American Midwest is infuriatingly conservative in geometry. definite integrals are primitive mathematical pleasure. from the cold, sparse simplicity of adding and multiplying arises a rich and diverse ecology of numerical life forms. to look at an integral and see tiny flower gardens enclosed by a long curling fence on one side is like writing an unabashed love letter to human creativity Walking to the sea in the sweet wet velvet of winter eve, I looked up and saw a beach of stars, galaxies strewn like seashells in smears of cosmic sand. Today I will sleep exactly one hour. [Coming soon: 300% more blog, including a photogenic Bildungsroman in which I visit the beach and McDonalds, not once but twice each!]