Poem: Shifts

[mdlbear]

There's that moment when everything changes,
But really it's just you,
Seeing things differently.

When you realize that the solid bench you're sitting on
Is mostly empty space between particles.
When you learn that even the particles
Aren't really particles, and that light isn't entirely waves either.

When you see the way special relativity views velocity
As simple rotation in four-space, 
And you study general relativity and realize
That it's geometry all the way down.

When you suddenly get recursion,
Reading the Algol 60 Report, with its crystalline prose
And elegantly compact rules.
When Goedel blows the top of your head off,
And you understand that some things simply can't be proved.
When you see how elegantly Turing applies the same trick.

When you realize that a little of the Unknowable
Isn't part of the Unknown anymore,
Because now you know why you can't know it.

First published in a comment in the October 2014 Crowdfunding Creative Jam, on the theme "Paradigm Shifting Without a Clutch."

This is entirely autobiographical, though the sequence has been messed with a little to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Mirrored from steve.savitzky.net. My poetry there is in really rough shape; hopefully I'll get a little work done on it soon.

Also adopted by ysabetwordsmith as part of her Schrodinger's Heroes series, which makes it unintentionally canonical fanfic for an imaginary TV show. Talk about shifting without a clutch! At least it has synchromesh. Or was that synchrotron?

Comments

Yay!

[ysabetwordsmith]

Found it and linked it on the Schrodinger's Heroes pages. Would you mind cross-linking that here to verify the SH connection from your end, as something we agreed on after you wrote it?

Re: Yay!

[mdlbear]

Updated! Glad you liked it.

[patoadam]

I'm jealous. I never got to study general relativity. And although I know (and, after all these years, could probably still derive) the formula for time dilation, I don't know why velocity is rotation in four-space.

[mdlbear]

I never studied relativity formally (that course came after quantum mechanics, which is where I gave up on physics and shifted my major over to math), but there are plenty of good books on the subject.

Put time on the X axis and position on the Y axis. Motion at constant velocity is a straight line going up and to the right.

Now consider what things look like from the POV of the thing moving. *Their* X axis is the line you just drew, so their entire reference frame is just rotated counterclockwise from that of the observer at "rest".

The equations of special relativity's time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction are easily derived from the geometry (if time is imaginary and distance is measured in light-seconds).

[patoadam]

Thanks!