Thursday, October 29, 2015

Past or Present



It is amazing how sometimes the most mundane of things can be incredibly interesting. The other day I was watching the Sunrise on the shores of the ancient seaport of Mamallapuram. With the beautiful Shore Temple on my side, I was pondering how we are witnessing the past in the form of this timeless sixth Century wonder. A few moments later the Sun rose above the sea, a beautiful orange ball of fire, making the sea and the waves glow like fire.

As I kept watching the sea, the reflections , the waves, the people swimming and the fishing boats near the horizon, it dawned on me that the picture I was witnessing had multiple samples of time. The sea and the waves and the boat were from the present time. The shining Sun however was from the past. It was about eight and a half minutes old. I was witnessing the past and the present at the same time. An incredibly miraculous thing isn't it?  

A friend further elaborated me that in fact it was not just two, but infinitely many. Light from each of the objects reaches my eye at the same time, after bouncing off from them at different times. so it was an infinitely many continuous  frames from different times. All from the past.

Indeed you can only see the past!! time would have past however small between when it bounced from the object and hit your eye. So we can never really observe anything in the present! So what we seem to see never existed! the reality that we seem to think of is in fact an illusion. 

Parmenides and Zeno used the argument of the impossibility of movement to the same conclusion of the illusory nature of reality.

Realizing that nothing is real, and what we see is not  what you get, we can enjoy this absurdly inexplicable life.

Monday, October 26, 2015

25 Ideas that captivated me

Over time I had been introduced to various ideas, and some stand out. These were encountered over a long period of time, and each one of them was a turning point in my understanding of things. I was recollecting some that had a great impact and made me ponder over things, and question my understanding. Here are some such ideas in no particular order (except perhaps the last one). Someday I would like to write about each of them

Everything is made of Atoms

Light Year and the Scale of the Universe

Dictionary

Stereoscopic Vision

Grammar

Euclid's Elements

Non-Euclidean Geometry

Mathematics is Made up

Peano's  Axioms


Things that can think - Flip-Flop and Digital Electronics

Every problem is Mathematically a Search problem.

Abstract Algebra

Calculus

Algorithm

Mathematical Model of a Computer program

Recursion

Parsing

Bresenham's Line Drawing Algorithm

Fractals

Godel's incompleteness theorem

Double Split Experiment

The Difficulty of Defining/Understanding anything absolutely.

Artificial Intelligence

Immortality

Who is the Knower