To see pictures of my adventures in Malawi click here for part I, and here for my trip to the lake.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

The Mind

Thought processes are very strange. I was just thinking about the movie “The Prestige” and thought “How did I start thinking about this?” So I traced my thoughts back. It turned out this line of thought had started when I laid down on a pillow and run my hand under my head to straighten my hair. I noticed how long it is getting which led to thinking about how long I was going to let it grow. This made me think about this coming summer and if I would go to an REU with long hair which made me think of my resume which made me think of my website which is linked to on my resume. On my website there is a quote by Einstein on the front page: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former.” This made me think of whether the universe is actually infinite which made me think of space, not space as in being more that 100 km above sea level but space as in the space the universe is composed of. This made me think of where there is just “empty” space and no particles (although it is all full of all sorts of things we don't really understand like dark matter and dark energy). I started thinking about the space inside an atom and about if it is actually empty and about electron clouds and quantum mechanics which made me think of the solar system model of the atom and how it was wrong but that made me think of the book “Wheels of Heaven” where angels are controlling each individual atom which made me think of the mode the book was written in and the ending statement that the unbeliever should test the method outlined in the book if they needed convincing which made me think that I'm sure no one has ever actually done that, which lead to thinking what would have happened if it were actually true and had been presented in a scientific setting and how they person would probably have been laughed off the stage. This made me think of the scene in “The Prestige” where Tesla tries to present his discoveries but the audience gets scared and all run out which is obviously how I got to thinking about the rest of the movie and started wondering about how I had starting thinking about it in the first place. This all happened in under a minute.

An interesting exercise is to try and think truly random thoughts, thoughts that are completely unrelated to any recent thoughts or stimuli. I'm not sure that it is actually possible but it is an interesting activity never the less.

3 comments:

  1. Wow . . . that's the longest run-on sentence I've ever seen/read. Even German sentences can't be longer than this one!

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  2. Well, let's see...if this is an example of a non-random thought, then probably nothing is truly random!

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  3. @ Joann, lol, I didn't even notice that sentence was so long till I just went back and read it again

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