It seems that scientists are trying to claim a special morality paradigm and seek advantages in social recognition for the fact that we do try to do things with a scientific ethos. We are trying to be romantically nostalgic, but in many eyes actually carry Shysiph’s rocks.
What is it all about? Lately, I met a guy investigating the possibility of a periodic asynchronous reset a photon detector. Imagine a cat walking by your night light. Every time the cat passes by, the light goes on. Light is reset synchronous to the cat after turning the light on, keeping the light on by a constant duration. Visualize now that you turn off the light periodically, asynchronous to the cat turning it on. Thus, it can sometimes happen that the light is on for a very short duration.
The light-on duration was just an allegory for a photon detector dead time. After detection, we are not able to detect the following photon during this dead time. In this particular case, if you make this dead time very short, it can cause undesirable behavior of the detector. So the guy firstly went to his desk thinking about the possible experiments, spending about 2 day on it. Then, he walked ferociously toward the lab to set it up for the experiments. He was indecisive on how to conduct the measurements. Each run takes one day and if the run is bound to mistakes, it will not be known up until the end and the time is lost. Usually, I saw him make seven mistakes and then make measurement for another two days. Two months after he finished the experiment, he came and painted this graph.
A straight line with a logarithmic y-axis is an exponential curve, in this case the distribution of the photons inter-arrival times. All the photon counts are included in areas A+B+C, but the synchronous reset outputs just A. The asynchronous outputs A+B. I asked him randomly why it took him so long for such a simple graph. His face went red hatred. He, the ultimate man, spent at least one month thinking about the bumps circled red until finally he stumbled upon some literature that opened up his vision and made him make a clear conclusions about the origin. Then, already consciously giving up on the idea to figure out why he has some occurrences at ΔT below Tdead and how to model it, he came up with the basic idea while randomly thinking about. He said he was laying in the bed while ideas came to his mind. I asked him why he was not thinking about his hot roommate, but he just disregarded my question. Not wanting to disturb his roommates, he waited until tomorrow Saturday to try the formulas out. By his expelled ecstasy, the curves where maching. Lost in any topic connectivity, I asked him if his biceps grew with this ecstasy. He got it faintly, not seeing the importance and connection.
I asked myself, tired of the listings, “What do I do here”? This guy lives in a bubble, foreign back home, foreign here even more, disjoint if not by anything than just by not knowing the domestic language.
When walking away, he just vaguely commented that there are still two unclear things. Clear, science is a explorative path. A very dispersive, and never ending invitation to just grasp/get this one more thing and get lost in the meaninglessness. As to make it clear, to make it exact.
And that is the biggest problem of a true scientist. Looking sad and sharp, but the process of the world is not exact at all, even if the world might end up being very exact. Life’s just like art. The process of science is like art itself. A great poet friend told me: “Writing a poem is a dynamic, is a movement of impressions that you temporarily attach to. You don’t write it by your own. If you do, you are either a bad poet or a stupido to think so. While reading poetry, don’t try to logically examine it. Just let the slides of associatives flow. If even the writer didn’t define the full-set meaning, how could you grasp by reading. Art is floating, you’ll never going to see it clean, naked. The woman always has this veil. Infinity in the hidden nothingness, a contradiction. You do again recreate and cocreate while reading. That’s why you don’t feel when looking at copied paintings. There was no creation you can attach to. When you examine the art, poetry, and you cocreate, the artists feels it. It is absurd that she enjoys this interaction as much as the creation process itself. A poet, a genius is however relentless in her exploration of the exact because she seeks to find the simplest dynamic but never reaches to see more than the veil.”
A contradiction between the dynamic relativistic process and the exploration of the exact is what saddens the lab scientist. But nevertheless, we continue to seek refuge in it, distancing. Relentlessly trying to cut the curtains and see the naked Isis at least for a few moments.
