on my mind

so what's lara been up to lately (besides obsessing over how meeting an old online friend will actually go in person and taking oodles of online quizzes?) here's the real deal:

reading, working (on math), and more reading mostly... 3 main trains of thought too, and my current reading falls into at least 2 of those categories :-P

(1) relationships -- my talking with travis (aka "black death") has gotten more frequent by a ton lately, and it's been lots of fun, but i've consequently been analyzing a lot of what makes particular friendships work -- and why exactly it's so much different to go from internet to phone to in person communication instead of the reverse order, which is more standard...

also, i think since i have some of nicole's stuff now, the repurcussions of her accident last september are hitting me more realistically... i've known that when i talked to her 10 months ago tomorrow, it was the last time in this life... that she's gone, and that i won't see her again, but with some of her possessions here, and the fact that it's been the better part of a year, i've realized the back of my head can't fool itself into "nicole's gone on a long trip somewhere where she doesn't have access to mail/phone/etc... she'll get back to the states and i'll hear from her eventually..." that's a chump explanation, but i think in some ways, up til recently, she's been away no longer than some other friends who have come back from working/travelling various other places, and now it's getting to the point i can't trick myself into dealing with it that way... especially since her parents sent the package of her stuff, which i got on the day of my birthday, i've been hit with periodic huge "i miss nicole" waves out of nowhere... yesterday was an especially hard one, and i seriously cried for like 2 hours... such is life i guess... it puzzles me what exactly sets me off sometimes, but i guess that i still miss her and her memory affects me that strongly just is all the more evidence that she was that special to me, right? ... and that can't have been a bad thing... patience with myself... that's the key

(2) math stuff -- i've been studying hard for quals since my birthday and getting frustrated a lot. i've recently come to the conclusion that my personality is not well suited to mesh with the constraints of the first year or two of grad school... i will make it, because i'm stubborn and determined, and even more because i have great friends who encourage me and help keep me going, but i will be much more in my element when i can do research instead of studying tricky problems for a crazy test in 59 days when i don't test well anymore... it's a mind game of convincing myself i can handle the upcoming hurdles and stress to get to the point where i have the credentials to really do what i want to do with my life.

(3) i've been doing lots and lots of extra reading... and here's the proof that i'm really an academic... here's what i've read for "fun" lately...immediately after finishing the millenium problems (see this entry: the millenium problems (what's going on with math and why you, who are friends of an aspiring mathematician, should care =P) ), the next two things i've read cover to cover are:

(a)Astronomy magazine: Origin and Fate of the Universe, collector's edition

(b)time magazine -- june 21, 2004 issue

this is my thing lately... you'll notice that the next book i plan to start this week is called the science of God.... astronomy was not a religious magazine in the least, but it's all about the science of what the universe looks like and how it behaves... the particular issue of Time i've been reading has the cover "faith, God, and the oval office"... lately i guess, i've been fascinated by the relationship between faith and science and how the two interact. time wasn't so much about the science but how faith interacts with politics (plus it had a multi-page article about blogs ;-P) what what american society may or may not consider to be the appropriate interaction between the two.

i guess i've come into contact over the years with various shades of two distinct voices on the meshing of religion and science and i fall between the two.

(1) ultra conservative: the Bible says so and that's all i need to know... evolution, the big bang, etc., they're all people making up stuff to replace religion they don't want to believe in -- there are some things only God should know and science is pushing the limit

(2) ultra liberal: science is the one reliable way to explore the world-- you can't prove the claims religions make and they all have such fundamental issues; the lack of separation between church and state in this country scares me -- it's all the Christians trying to inflict their view on others and i want nothing of it.

i get so frustrated with both voices and am somewhere between the two. mathematics isn't a laboratory science, but it is a science... it's the study of patterns in the world, and the way i see it, once of the few disciplines that can honestly claim to seek genuine irrefutable truth about the world around us... math proofs are not subject to needing experimental confirmation, they're not just theories -- they show us FACTS about the world...

one of the theorems that most fascinates me is Godel's theorem, which although i'm not a logic expert by far, says that in any system of axoims that uses arithmetic, there will always exist statements that are TRUE, but are NOT able to be proven from the given known axioms (i.e. "obvious" facts) about the system. i like to read this as, no matter how much of what we know and scientifically prove about the world, just because one can't rig up an experiment and concretely prove the existence of God, this THEOREM leaves the necessary room -- the existence of God is one of those things that is entirely true, and not able to be verified by what we know and can get our hands on -- interesting, eh?

i'm done rambling and being preachy and whatever -- this is the food for thought on my mind lately -- starting the science of God this weekend, maybe even this afternoon, and more discussion of it as i hit on interesting points... in the meantime -- some quotes i like from 777 mathematical conversation starters (see previous entry) relating to the above :-)

"There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion." ~Henry David Thoreau

"No longer is theology embarrassed by the contradiction between God's immanence and transcendence. Hyperspace touches every point of three-space. God is closer to us than our breathing. He can see every portion of our world, touch every particle without moving a finger through our space. Yet the Kingdom of God is completely "outside" of three-space, in a direction in which we cannot even point." ~Martin Gardner

"There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the providence of science." ~Carl Friedrich Gauss

"Science and religion are both extremely important issues, but they do different things. Science deals with the factual state of nature, and religion deals with ethics and meaning." ~Stephen J. Gould

"Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God. " ~Maria Mitchell, astronomer, first woman elected to the Amaerican Academy of Arts and Sciences

"Everyone who is seriuosly involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe -- a spirit vastly superior to that of man... in this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiousity of someone more naive." ~Albert Einstein, letter to a child who asked if scientists pray

"Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." ~Albert Einstein

.... and what do you think? (as if any of you ever leave comments anymore anyhow ;-P)