The Importance of Being Idle

To Infinity and Beyond!

Yesterday was a weird day. Over the weekend Kieron's sister had an aneurysm, and collapsed. She was eventually taken to a specialist neurology centre in Oxford, and the weekend and the start of the week have not been an easy time for anybody involved. Yesterday was the day Kieron could see his sister for the first time, so we drove him down there (and back). Thankfully she's a lot better now, she's concious, breathing by herself and seems to be pretty much back to herself, apart from being extremely tired all the time. For some reason some other people had invited themselves along, perhaps mistaking it for some sort of road trip, and as Kieron didn't seem to mind them being there we let it slide and off we went. Long story short, it was a good thing; Kieron was incredibly tense and worried (as you would be), he'd not been sleeping or eating or doing anything very much; after seeing her he fell asleep in the back of the car, and when we stopped off for a bite to eat he ordered a mixed platter for four and ate it all to himself (and Kieron is so skinny his ass sticks inwards!). Anyway, that was that really; it was a long drive, we got home late, but it was a Good Thing, and I think we made a positive difference to somebody's life, and you can't really want for much more than that in a day.
But I got more!
After we got home, there was an odd little documentary on about mathematicians who'd essentially been driven mad by the things they'd discovered. Now I'll argue that the cause of most of their insanity wasn't their theories, rather it was the reaction of the mathematical community at large to these theories. Sadly, mathematicians, like the common mass of humanity, are far too wedded to their own pre-conceived notions, and will resist almost until death new ideas, especially ones as massive as these (Cantor on the nature of infinity, Bolzmann on entropy, Godel on completeness and Turing on computability). What was really interesting though, was that the ideas that allegedly drove these people mad (again, in Turings case it wasn't the maths, it was the security services chemically castrating him that drove him to suicide) were the very ideas that always fascinated me as a student; the metamathematics of why maths works in the first place! I know I used to spend days getting lost in problems and thoughts, not wanting to go anywhere or speak to anyone for fear of losing the state of conciousness that seems to be a necessity for contemplating the really big stuff. Maybe that state of conciousness is what sent these guys over the edge though, so maybe being a slacker isn't such a bad thing after all...
Other than that, I've felt pretty shitty today. For all that we did good yesterday, I had to drive in the dark for the last hour or so of the day, and whilst it wasn't too bad at the time (it was a little disorienting, but no more than driving had been once I started doing that again), but the after effects have been pretty unpleasant. I'll get there though, I've got to; my brain won't learn to cope with these things if I avoid them, will it?
So, how big is infinity anyway...?

posted by BadMonkey @ 6:55 PM