Note to Self: Do Not Argue with Mathematics

In addition to technology, which I blogged about yesterday, I am also interested in time and theories of time.  So, where does one go for this kind of question?  Philosophically speaking, one goes to Kant, Heidegger, Deleuze, Bakhtin and a bunch of other philosophers.  I usually go to those resources, and half the time I end up with my ideas all in knots...meaning that all of the critical theory that I think I know gets all twisted and confused leaving me to untangle myself.

So, I took a different approach this time.  I went to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.  Let me be clear: this book has not clarified anything for me.  Oh no, it most definitely has not.  It has, however, raised more questions than I originally had.  And that's a good thing.  I think.  This was a good resource to begin with because it reminded me of one important thing that I often take for granted, which is that until very recently (18th century-ish) people thought that the universe was in a constant (i.e. static) state.  Important to remember.

A few other things that the book taught me are:

1) The universe is expanding by between 5% and 10% every thousand million years.

2) Hawking was married to Jane Wilde (until 1990 when they divorced, and she recently published a memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen).

3) there is something called quarks and "matter on the earth is made up mainly of protons and neutrons, which in turn are made up of quarks".

4) It may be that our very existence is a consequence of the production of protons.  Put another way, we are all made up of quarks.

5) The earth and the sun will likely collide in about a thousand million million million million years.

6) Scientists often argue against one or more predicted results of their discovery before some other scientist proves through experiment that the predicted result is valid (for example, Einstein wrote a paper arguing that stars would not shrink to zero size even though his theory of relativity led to proving the existence of black holes).

I also learned that I am fighting a losing battle with mathematics.  According to Stephen Hawking, "one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem."  Really?!  This could be the answer to my poor performance in math.  I'm always arguing with equations or proofs that don't make sense to me and when I ask someone to explain it, s/he is always like "it is what it is" and simply restates the equation when I am looking for the history of how that equation came to be...and that's not really a question I can handle.  Obviously, I am not going for a doctorate in physics or anything of the like.

Hawking ends the penultimate chapter like this: "To summarize, the laws of science do not distinguish between the forward and backward directions of time.  However, there are at least three arrows of time that do distinguish the past from the future.  They are the thermodynamic arrow, the direction of time in which disorder increases; the psychological arrow, the direction of time in which we remember the past and not the future; and the cosmological arrow, the direction of time in which the universe expands rather than contracts."  I can make sense of this in some ways, but in other ways I am totally lost with this and wondering if I actually really did just read the book or did I just daydream my way through it?  

Hawking also claims that "if you remember every word in this book, your memory will have recorded about two million pieces of information: the order in your brain will have increased by about two million units."  Yeah, I definitely did not register two million pieces of information...  I'll be grappling with Hawking's assertion that quantum gravity is the key to understanding our universe and how people are trying to get there...but I do know that it has a lot to do with math.

For now and forever, I think I will stick with the psychological arrow of time.  Another benefit of reading this is that I think those philosophers mentioned above will seem way more accessible when I get to reading their work on time.  And of course, reading things outside of my scope is good for keeping me humble.  Very humble.