New Life at the Bates' Motel

One of those sayings I really tend to abuse is an old one from an old show which I forgot the name of. To "get the hell out of Dodge" means to leave town abruptly and without turning back (referring of course to Dodge City, Kansas a frontier on the old west...yes, cowboys and outlaws and all that jazz). Wednesday around 10am I found out I needed to be at RPI on Thursday for a meeting at 10am. With 24 hours to pack, rest, and travel I feel like I can invent my own variation of the saying--to get the hell back to RPI.


So here I am back at RPI--and to describe it in one word, I would choose "ugh". My second choice, however, would be desolate. Picture as evidence. That one vehicle you see in the lot is mine, and its taken in the lot my room oversees. The apartments on the left are where I am staying--each unit is two levels, four people with full kitchen, living room, and bath. There is literally noone around, I think I saw two of my roomates for about ten minutes yesterday but that may have been a hallucination based on my need for company. A long way off I can hear the slow, deliberate rumble of progress and traffic, but here its a ghost town.

First impressions of my room: old. Actually it kind of has a Bates' Motel atmosphere to it--as if not just one, but several people have died here. So disturbingly old is this place that I was absolutely positive that if I were to disturb the furniture setup or open the cabinet drawers after sundown that an evil spirit would hiss and fly around the room. Fortunately this did not occur--I am well-moved in.

Further adding proof to my idea that this is a den of ghosts and murder was a present I found in the bottom drawer of the cabinet. I have proof now that the prior residents were girls--and fashion conscious girls at that. In this picture Ben is saying, "come on, really?!?" while gesturing at the abominations.

Today my goal is to recover all or most of my things from the fraternity house--or at least what has not been ruined. It still astounds me how efficiently--and completely--things can be destroyed (yes, destroyed is not even overkill in this case) when they are left there. From the emails I've been getting, this summer has sounded like a particularly crazy one, hopefully my bike is okay!

So just now a huge obnoxious noise bellowed from the main campus--my first thought was monster. My second was air raid. Turns out it was a test of RPI's alert system. A man's voice came on after the crazy siren, but, due to echo I couldn't make out a single word he said--not very useful in an emergency haha!

Below are pictures of my room after being moved-into. The before pictures are basically this but with no stuff in them--and the bed was in a weird orientation--swapped with the desk, so I fixed that problem REAL SOON.




It occurs to me that I didn't even blog about my adventure to Boston! Ugh I have so much to catch up on! I can't promise that I can ever get to that, so here is a picture of my sweetheart FARAH <--named so that everyone knows its her :) packing her bag and checking that she has all her paperwork for the fiftieth time.

Oh my God the RPI alert thing has turned into one huge screeching tone and I feel like my head is going to pop--I have to stop sorry!

-B

Unified Field Theory as a Pipe Dream

Not much in physics bugs me--most likely because I am not very well-versed in sciences in general. I did not read that guy's book, I didn't attend that seminar, and to be completely honest, the answer to "did you do your homework?" falls somewhere between "uhm..." and "hahahahahaha! seriously!?!".

But one thing--above all others--does. It is the idea of the Theory of Everything. It has many guises--and many refer to it as Unified Field Theory these days. Unified Field Theory (a variation of the theory of everything which reduces all to field equations) is a type of field theory that would allow all that may be thought of as fundamental forces and elementary particles to be written in terms of a single field (thank you wikipedia!). This condenses all force, all matter--into one equation (complexity unknown).

Sure this sounds difficult, but possible, right?

Wrong.

Let me explain.

So there was this smart guy named Gödel--a mathematician. He axiomated an approach to logic and validation in the form of two theorems that reference eachother that established upper limits to all but the most trivial mathematical systems. These are called "Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems".

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure" is capable of proving all facts about natural numbers. Basically, no theory or set of theories can prove everything about numerical processes.

The second incompleteness theorem shows that if this system is also capable of proving basic facts about the natural numbers, then one arithmetic truth the system cannot prove is the consistency of the system itself. Or, that if the system proves something about natural numbers, then the system cannot be proven to be true.

The ramifications of this should be startling--basically any theory that involves the natural numbers cannot be complete--it is either missing some element or it itself cannot be proven to be true--it is a theory that proves incompleteness reigns.

Any "Unified Field Theory" will certainly be a consistent, non-trivial mathematical theory--and therefore, by these, it must also be incomplete. Unified Field Theory brings us nowhere--good news for us physicists!

Q.E.D.