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(04/17/15 9:26am)
When my middle and high-school orchestra teacher first exposed me to South Indian classical music, my musical sensibilities were offended. I was 14 and had a very clear conception of what music should be: either Coldplay or Rachmaninov and nothing else. My taste for music was as overtly and melodramatically emotional—and traditionally Western—as I was then. There was little place in my worldview for music that downplayed melody, focused on rhythm and used repetition in minute variations as its primary means of developing ideas. I was similarly shocked when the same teacher, on the same day of class, showed us Shaker Loops—a minimalist piece by John Adams. Here too, melody was downplayed and minute variation occupied the forefront. In both cases, I had my first brush with music in which melody and harmony were not the most important aspects. This shocked me because I had never even entertained the notion that this could be the case.
(04/03/15 9:26am)
This is my penultimate column as an undergraduate: after this one, you'll have the highest privilege of reading one more by me, and then I'll be off to graduate school.
(03/20/15 10:54am)
The past year or so has seen me switch allegiances slowly from physics to math. Consequently, I’ve had to acquaint myself with the subtle differences and interrelationships between the two practices. The kind of physics I was intending to do is very mathematical, and conversely the kind of mathematics I hope to do is very physicsy in flavor, so it’s not that the two differ substantially in what they investigate, at least as far as the subfields I’m interested in are concerned. The differences are a little more subtle and mostly concern methodology. What physicists call a “proof” often fails to meet the standards of rigor of mathematicians. Physicists, on the other hand, leave it to the mathematicians to fuss over details that seem to them to be intuitively clear. Historically, physicists have treated math as a tool to properly formulate their ideas and mathematicians have used physics as inspiration for new directions in their study.
(03/06/15 10:07am)
When I was a little kid, my mother brought home a little stuffed toy lion that she had worked hard to win at some contest at work. My response: to ask “What does it do?” and, upon learning that I had just been given a simple, level one stuffed animal with no extra capabilities, to toss it aside. I was expecting to be able to squeeze the lion and have it tell me that it loves me. Or to push a button and watch it dance. Or to pull a string and marvel as it shits little brown jelly beans. Anything to prevent me from having to animate it with my own imagination. Which, by the way, is strange for a child—they’re usually so good at endowing simple things with rich and vivid histories. But on this particular day, I wasn’t living out that childlike wisdom.
(02/20/15 10:34am)
Snow is a beautiful thing, but it too quickly becomes a history book–a journal of the past. It too quickly becomes slushy and muddy and complicated. Even when it’s been hardened by a cycle of thawing and refreezing, it bears the imprints of tires that have rolled through, of a tailbone that has made precipitous and intimate acquaintance with the ground.
(02/06/15 10:21am)
Charles Ives was a life insurance salesman with an inner life. After receiving a music degree from Yale in 1898, Ives decided to continue composing, but only as a hobby. His main vocation would remain insurance sales. In a lot of ways, the artistic independence afforded to Ives by this decision were necessary for him to be able to create what he did: some of the most relentlessly experimental, yet beautiful and prophetic music ever written. Indeed, it wasn’t until after the Second World War, long after Ives had mostly given up composition, that the rest of the musical world would catch up to what Ives had been doing at the beginning of the century. It was only then that his genius was retroactively acknowledged and he was raised to the sacred place in the history of American classical music that he now occupies.
(01/23/15 9:59am)
One of the most fertile re-conceptualizations in abstract mathematics is the shift from the question, “Does x equal y?” to the question, “Do x and y share enough properties that, as far as their membership in a particular class of objects is concerned, they’re equal?” This might be a little abstract, so let me give an example that might help clarify the point. Consider the circle and the square. As sets of points in the plane, they’re obviously not the same object. But one can be continuously stretched into another without “ripping” or “glueing.” This makes them the same object as far as a field of mathematics called topology is concerned. Topology studies only those properties of mathematical entities which don’t distinguish between objects that can be continuously morphed into each other—a square and a circle, or a donut and a coffee mug.
(01/09/15 12:49pm)
When I was a little kid, my dad would participate in an annual conference at Disney World, and my mom and I would come along to take part in the magic. I loved those trips, and I remember reading excitedly about all of the resorts, parks and attractions in my little Disney guide book. I don’t think it was the magic that excited me—if anything, I’m more susceptible to believing in magic now than I was when I was five—you can’t study theoretical physics and not believe in witchcraft. What really thrilled me about Disney World was the way in which it seemed like the adults had conspired so thoroughly and immaculately to create a place of pure fun. I had a profound faith that the World was held together by some behind-the-scenes order designed by people who knew what was going on. If the boats stopped suddenly in Splash Mountain, the higher-ups had a reason for why this was the optimal arrangement of things, and that reason certainly wasn’t that somebody’s discarded turkey leg had gotten caught on the tracks.
(12/08/14 10:04am)
Time is on my mind. Both as a theoretical physicist-in-training and a college senior about to enter my last semester of responsibility-free life, I can’t escape contemplating that inexorable force that is the passage of time.
(11/12/14 10:18am)
A large part of the genius of George Harrison’s music is that, on the one hand, he is always striving for a sense of metaphysical oneness with the universe, and, on the other, he is fully (and painfully) aware of the insuperable distance between us all. It’s a tension that is everywhere in his work, and it’s especially strong in a song that hits me particularly hard–“Behind That Locked Door.”
(10/29/14 9:24am)
There’s something about the feeling of driving west as the day breaks around you, the sun rising in your rear-view mirror. Maybe it’s the glorious auburn light that instills wonder in all those who drink it in. Maybe it’s the feeling of satisfaction in living out a bit of American folklore as you whiz past the roadside McDonalds' and the strip malls that make this country great. Whatever it was, I was feeling it this weekend when, at 6:30 in the morning, I found myself driving to Winston-Salem to take the Math subject GRE. I felt a little bit like a cross between Jack Kerouac and an early, Oregon Trail-style pioneer. And I felt proud, proud to take part in the mythology of my homeland. But as my train of thought wandered on that drive, I realized that I was proud not so much of being an American, but of something deeper.
(10/15/14 8:54am)
In recent days, I’ve taken to blowing bubbles as a pastime. The exercise has taught me that children are onto something—the meaning of life, maybe—in their passion for those beautiful spherical ephemeral beasts, something that we all lose as we get older and then have to relearn in new and harder ways. You see, bubbles are a vaccine against the grief of loss. Too often, I’ve blown a bubble whose oscillatory wobblings I particularly liked only to have it pop in my face before I could fully appreciate it. With bubbles, though, the pain of loss is common enough and mild enough that it’s easy to develop healthy ways of dealing with it. It’s not that they become more beautiful because of their short lives—it’s rather that you learn to come away from the experience with the feeling of something gained, not something lost. You realize that, no matter how short the fates declare the experience to be, you get to appreciate something worthwhile and the pain of loss is counterproductive to this enterprise. That’s why I think bubbles are like a vaccine—they infect you with a weaker version of a particular pain so that you learn how to handle it more readily.
(10/01/14 8:43am)
The human voice figures prominently in the theory of Indian--Hindustani--classical music. In the Hindustani tradition, all other instruments are seen as striving to emulate the human voice. I think theorists of Indian classical music have hit upon something that applies in non-musical contexts as well. Even if they’re not singing, our voices can have a powerful emotional intensity, and this can be a source of immense positive change. Activism is a great example of this process at work. While they might not always be taken completely seriously, members of those communities affected by a given issue (e.g. the LGBTQ community or women) have an important place in the public forum where they can make the rest of us aware of the difficulties they face. In other words, they have their voices at their disposal.
(09/17/14 10:40am)
The language of rights has been part of the grammar of Western morality for a while—the concept came into its modern form around the time of the Enlightenment. In a lot of ways, this language has been useful. Historically, it arose in response to a distribution of power in which the interests of the many were entirely subjugated to the interests of a very small group (often one person). In these contexts, rights were a way of asserting that the interests of the "regular people" mattered too—it no longer became acceptable for the happiness of many people to be sacrificed in the name of some vague idea like "the state" or "the collective," which really just meant the interests of those in power. In their role as a safeguard against totalitarian or absolutist infringements, rights have it right.
(09/03/14 10:54am)
This summer I had the distinct pleasure of getting all the way through James Joyce's "Ulysses." Its reputation for being a difficult read is well-earned, but there are also moments of lucidity, like this exchange between the protagonist, Leopold Bloom, and a bar patron:
(06/12/14 6:22am)
For the past two weeks, I’ve been in France, the birthplace of the famous—or infamous—slogan: liberté, égalité, fraternité. Given that I’ve been beset on all sides by it, I can’t help but think about the particular accomplishments of the period of history during which the motto was born. Between the French Revolution and ours, the late eighteenth century saw what were some of the most radical experiments in applied political philosophy in the history of the human race. Crucially, it was the first time individual human rights were truly championed. Though rights aren’t the last word on political philosophy, they capture some of the features that are essential to the way we think about ethics now. Perhaps the most relevant of these features is universality—in the French and American revolutionary contexts, rights applied to all men equally.
(05/29/14 7:14am)
Back in the early days of the debate around the Affordable Care Act, a sizable proportion of the discussion was centered around what the ACA’s critics called “death panels”—groups of bureaucrats that were supposed to decide who does and does not get health care. And while death panels turned out to be a complete fabrication—there is no part of the ACA that specifies anything resembling such a thing—the whole scare indirectly raised questions that are worth thinking about. The reason the idea of death panels is so abhorrent is that we’re placing in the hands of a small group of officials the power to decide who lives. But as a collective and as individuals, we are endlessly and inevitably confronted with life-or-death choices, even if our terror of that responsibility prevents us from seeing them that way.
(05/15/14 9:19am)
The universe doesn’t owe you jack s**t.
