In Series …
THE APERIODICALS
Local (personal, potentially shallow, and subject to change) outlooks on science, technology, growth, and occasionally culture and history. The goal is to write something every week, but whether it can make its way to FWPhys is random. Hence the series title.
Content Statement: this essay contains human-supervised embellishment by ChatGPT. I am in a hurry after all. To be fair though, it didn’t get my point and only supplied minor prose elements.
As I found myself running away from loud FaceTiming businessmen in the Air NZ VIP lounge, a place of free import beers and buffets, I also recognise that this space held more than just material indulgences. It was a realm of shared experiences — for me at present, imagined shared experiences. Do I want to share them?
That for so many who goes all around the place, that the angled view of a stretch of the tarmac, vague rumbles of faraway takeoffs, and the golden sea waves and mountains at sunset are all that one sees at rest when visiting this beautiful country.
Sympathy stirred within me for those who had traversed these lands without ever hiking among those peaks. Shrouded in mystique and grandeur, they are the essence of adventures awaiting.
At the same time, I know that that is not the only way via which we hike.
The act of taking on roles that require or enable frequent travels to foreign land is a journey in its own right. Our evolutionary heritage as entrepreneurial primates imprinted upon us an instinct to explore, but also to see life as a journey, no matter what dimensionality the land, and the nullity of the tree-analogues.
It’s another idea fast on its path of becoming trite. That while the material world seems to be organised in some slight generalisation of a 3-Euclidean space. Some worldly / personal success stories are built on the idea of navigating the higher dimensions of abstraction just as if they are other sets of the 3D world, as if coordinates, metrics, and linear algebra exist across all the “phase space” variables that are another way of seeing and organising our world. Votes, team rankings, annual revenue, that kind of stuff.
At the same time of having to remind myself of how large the universe is, I need to keep in mind that it is distractingly large, and every path in some sense it its own full story branch.
Maybe it helps ease the mind as not looking around too much in the lounge. Maybe it helps to negate some of the details when taking our brief looks at this world.
I suppose this is a nebulous lesson learned about adulthood.
I probably will leave this edition here for now.
Yourong Frank Wang 