Jim Gates is cool.
When and how did you first become interested in physics and mathematics?
Well the answer to the question has, unfortunately, a number of parts. The first part is when I was about eight years old. My father brought home a book one day and it was about space travel. And in this book I learned that the stars in the sky were not just lights but places to go. And suddenly my universe got very much larger and I knew that science was the way, science and technology, the way to get to such places. So that was part one.SourceThen a little bit later we had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and I was probably in the third grade, and I was bored one day, just thumbing through one of the volumes. And I came across Schrodinger’s Equation, and I was amazed. I knew it was mathematics because I saw an equal to sign. Then I saw a bunch of symbols, Greek letters and partial derivatives, which I had absolutely no idea of what it meant. It had some sort of strange attraction to me, because it was like looking at notes on bars for music, but not knowing how to read the music. So I felt some affinity and said, gee I’d like one day to know what that thing means.
And then finally, the third part of it is that when I was a junior in high school, I actually took a course in physics, I was the only junior in the class. And a really good physics teacher. And at the beginning of the course he made the simple demonstration that if you let an object roll down an inclined plane and measure the time that it takes for it to roll down, you find the distance traveled is proportional to the square of the time.
Now for most people that doesn’t mean anything, but for me this was actually an amazing demonstration, because I had always known that mathematics was essentially a game that we play inside our heads, and that you could make up the rules for mathematics just like you could make up the rules for anything else. And so by the time I was a junior, I was quite used to thinking of mathematics as something imaginary, not having anything to do with the world around us. And yet suddenly here was this teacher showing me that this crazy game that I knew how to play inside my head could describe the way things move in the world around me.
I never got over that experience. I immediately said that’s what I want to do, because I know how to make up stuff real well, so if I’m going to make up these mathematical games and some of them are actually going to be real, then what could be more fun?
I just bumped into that after a search for “string theory.” In general, I enjoy sensing the interconnectedness of things. The various paths I’ve taken through the internet often create interesting models of this broader activity. The following is a lame example of this experience but it just freaked me out a little.
A recent search began based on my future need(?) for a small (tiny) computer or portable machine (laptops included) that is the lowest price possible and the same or better performance than my current pIII 900mhz machine. While searching I remembered a tiny cube that someone had set up as a server or a test machine. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out a search term that would unlock the secret of that mysterious tiny cube computer (I was in a hurry).
Meandering this way and that I finally moved into cheap and DIY ways to do serious backups like RAID or NAS situations. (Yes, I’m scared my computer is going to eat shit and die at some point.) I eventually came to a link for a strange hybrid router/NAS/and-more sorta thing that was coming out from U.S. Robotics. After reading through the article I backed up and looked at the previous article listings. Directly below that piece was a brief how-to story on setting up a CerfCube as an Embedded Linux Server – the mystery cube computer. Very weird.
Most likely it is a testament to how small the nerd world actually is, or the real world for that matter. It may also be attributed to the same thing that causes my CRT poisoning. And I am a mega nerd. There are good things out there though. I have to remember to put all these good things to use or I fear I’m no different than any other couch potato beyond my office chair, keyboard and mouse. (where are we all going, what does it all mean?)
12 June 2003, 18:07 ::
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