bending light

recurrented

bending light

post by Recurrented (rachel-farley) · 2024-12-17T22:40:06.950Z · LW · GW · 5 comments

This is a link post for https://futuring.substack.com/p/bending-light

5 comments

When a light appears on the horizon in the middle of the ocean like Venus rising and seems to be motionless yet grows brighter; you’re on a collision course.

During midnight watch in the middle of the Atlantic I would hold my breath when I’d see a light. Something else is out here. How dare they.

You run below deck to check the radar but actually move quite slowly while messing around with your harness and frozen hands to cross the death zone. No man’s land. I don’t remember what we called it except that it bruised my knees deeply to the bone.

Usually an unmarked fishing boat. Sometimes a nato warship. Quietly moving through the North Atlantic. Light in the night slipping past each other.

I never took physics in high school. I had become quite stubborn by then with a special interest against things I was supposed to do and persuasive enough to not have to do them. I’ve filled in with Feynman since but retain some childlike wonder of things I have come to understand later. How do boats float? Magic.

I think of the ocean lights later sitting in my friend's boyfriend's house in the hills above the bay. We watch the light twinkle across the city. Why? I like to sit with why enough to fill me with wonder. In the space of suspended possibility - in a possibility not yet collapsed into certainty - anything is possible.

And then I look it up. The twinkle is due to bending light. Of course.

My god how much of the physical world makes more sense through psychics and math. I am not a practitioner of either but I am drawn to those who are.

It is London right at the dawn of the current LLM cycle and I have acquired a goth PhD physics student as a tutor to try to become literate in linear algebra. I convinced myself it was the source code of all math. And math the foundation of code. And code the foundation of consciousness. It’s not quite that simple. I just wanted to know enough to notice the beauty in it. And I did. And it is beautiful. In its way.

I felt like I swallowed a butterfly after learning about imaginary numbers for the first time. There are still such strange things to learn.

Y - my favorite, the bleed into philosophy and an unknown. There is a truth beneath the surface here that feels alive. I don’t quite understand topology but I like its soil.

I miss her. My tutor. She dressed like a shadow but taught with lightness. The depth of her knowledge far deeper than I could engage with but she was happy to dance between the areas of my interest and lack of dedication to practicing outside our sessions. We met at a coffee shop. I had forgotten my headphones and overheard her teaching someone so well. Later we’d meet up and do math down the street from my place, one of us always running late.

Time another reality that I choose to believe is not quite real. At least I try to ignore it. And used to try to distort it. Usually I try to keep it within myself but there've been a few people in my earlier twenties who’ve been on the receiving end of these dark arts.

As math is to software, chemistry is to hardware. Or at least in semiconductors. I know that’s not quite how proofs work but they're all connecting in my mind.

I wanted to ask her questions without answers. There’s gravity to certain places. Why? Why do some people have more gravity? If gravity is a force, how can I feel its weight? Why does time collapse upon itself?

Wind appears completely still when the relative speed matches the actual speed. You can be sailing fast and know you’re moving but with nothing to anchor the visual field and no drag to feel - it feels like time standing still. It is haunting.

I know time is passing because I’m missing out on things that are important to me. I know the way time passes like the rhythm of a shift. The passage of time is more unrelenting than the passage of the atlantic. Why.

Oh my mind, I am losing it s l o w l y