I've always been a bit of a wierdo. I mean really, why should we not call a spade, a spade, right? I know this. I don't really mind being what I am because I like to think I'm weird for very good reasons that will benefit me throughout my life. (Whether that's true or not remains with the jury)
One of the weirdo things I pride myself in has to do with subjectivity and perspective. It started in the back of my mother's pea-green Fiat, the one with the headliner that had all those little perforated holes in it. During any car journey, you could find me laying on the back seat staring at the headliner, and I would have undoubtedly looked cross eyed to any outside observer. Of course I wasn't, I was just playing tricks on my brain by focusing in such a way that in my vision there was an illusion that layer upon layer of holey headliner was washing into my vision and creeping ever closer to my nose with each wave. That's all. That was my introduction into understanding that I see what I want to see, and that what I see isn't necessarily correct, or even real.
Ever since then, I have always been the kind of person who gets off on flipping her feet over the back of the couch, hanging her head over the edge of the seat and imagining I'm walking around on the ceiling. I love standing on metro escalators in foreign countries where they hang their advertisements parallel with the angle of the escalator instead of parallel with the horizon (Prague, Moscow come to mind, but London Underground is no good because they orient their posters with the horizon). I look across the escalators and tilt my head so that my head is in line with the posters and imagine that everyone moves around the world leaning at a 45ยบ angle. I wonder about how I would get around if our house was turned on it's side and how on earth, if I were to mount the stairs from the upper floor (now partially the lower floor) and walk on the upright (front) bit of the stairs (which would now take me UPstairs) to the downstairs hall (which is now upstairs since the house flopped on it's side), would I ever safely land the 20 foot drop to the fridge?
(If you would like a blueprint of said problem for clarification, please send a self-addressed, stamped envelope and a pressed €20 to Mollyblog Towers, Bogland, EU)
There's a book by Orson Scott Card called Ender's Game and though I'm not really into fantasy science fiction, I loved that book and I loved Ender because he would have understood me. He had available to him an anti-gravity room where he and his peers played lazer tag type "field" games in 3D space. You obviously enter the room oriented a certain way and everyone always played in the space as though they were stuck with the same orientation as outside the room. Ender came along and figured out that he could take his opponents by surprise by abandoning the notion that you had to maintain an upright attitude in a 3D space, that you didn't have to play the game oriented the same way you came in, "standing" upright. You could realign yourself and make the "far end" of the room the "top" and play the game on a different plane to your opponents. That's what Ender did, he oriented his body differently than is opponents, took them by surprise, and won while they all stood around scratching their heads about whether or not you could do that, whether or not a move like that was legal.
It wasn't until university that I began dabbling with concepts of physics which, of course, I cannot in any way claim to understand fully, but which I do "get" in short, bright bursts from time to time. Relativity, I get. Special relativity, I get. Thermodynamics... sure, pretty much. Quantum theory? Oooooh... no, but it "gets" me. I don't think there's any way for me to every fully get there in particular, but I did once have a flash of understanding about the quantum atom which fled as quickly as it came, and it changed my life. That day, for the fraction of a second, I knew what it meant to be an electron belonging to a quantum atom; that I could be predicted to be in any number of places at any given time and that I was really in those predicted places all at once until someone observed me being in a singular location, and that should I entwine with any other electron we would go on reacting to each other no matter how far apart we were, even light years.
Don't ask me to elaborate on that one. I still don't get it. But it's sooooo cool.
It was upon reflection of these wierdo things I do or think about, and reflection on things I learned in conceptual physics, that I remembered a boy I once liked telling me about how the movie The Matrix changed his life. I remember going to see Mr. Reeves deliver another wooden performance, expecting to be blown away by teh concept of the movie but in the end was only left feeling horrified because The Matrix seemed just pithy and paranoid compared to the quantum theory I was studying at the time. But then again, I was reminded that we see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. And if Harry Nilsson was anyone to judge the situation, he would say that that, my friends, is The Point. It's all, every part of life, subjective. And I am, truly, a weirdo.
"Well, that's about it. That's the end of the story and it's also the end of the album. So, thank you. And good night."
(P.S. for another reading recommendation, the most charming, creative physics-related book you'll ever lay hands on is Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. Go get it!)
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