A Collection of Thoughts
What is silence?
On the way back home from school, the bus always stopped at a particular light. The stoplight, like a commander of an army, halted columns of cars, and no sound could be heard while they waited. It felt like time had stopped as the cars stared at the red light, and no one really knew how long the pause lasted. The commander took his job seriously, never once missing his duty. Funnily enough, he checked in every so often just to stop every car I was on. I always wondered what people thought of during these times of silence, or if they even thought at all. Years later, during random times of silence I recalled the commander. I questioned the probability that he was able to stop me every time I tried to pass by. But was it really a mathematical phenomenon that he was trying to show me? In his novel The Tin Drum, Günter Grass wrote about a boy who never wanted to grow up, and through the magic of literature, the boy’s wish was fulfilled. If someone wishes to be eternally silent, will the magic of the world grant the wish (whether or not magic exists is another topic of discussion)?
At some point during my life, the element of silence disappeared. As I stepped further into life, I was told more and more that human interactions lead to success, and the skill of public speaking is invaluable. They are not wrong, I suppose, but I haven’t been able to prove them right either. What is the role of silence then? Perhaps it is only a question that can be answered during silence. Out of courtesy and (to some degree) understanding, some professors pause in lectures and ask for questions on the concepts they just went through. Most of the time the request is answered with silence rather than questions. What does silence mean here? Is it the unanimous understanding of the material, or the lack of?
To understand, or not to?
I arrived earlier than usual to my first quantum mechanics class. A man, supposedly the professor of the class, came in and lifted the chalk. As I expected him to write the logistics of the class and introduce himself, he instead wrote, “I do not understand quantum mechanics.” I laughed, and thinking about it now, no one really understands anything, not just quantum mechanics.
One of the many postulates of quantum mechanics states that measurement of an observable yields one of its eigenvalues, and collapses the state to its corresponding eigenvector. The statement is as easy as 1 + 1 is 2 if one just accepts it as it is, but sadly, none of the words in the statement is (and probably never will be) defined concretely. If I quote Dirac, measurement is an act of operating on the state with a projection operator, usually denoted by P. I would like to think of measurement as an action of the experimentalist taken to obtain some information about the system of interest, denoted by an operator by the name of P, which stands for people. But then, measurement in itself is a philosophical question, and I would like to leave the work of verifying the validity of the postulates to my philosophy friends.
A weird paradox arises when I say no one really understands anything, because I am suggesting that I indeed understand something that led me to the conclusion I made. Perhaps understanding is a quantum mechanical system, and it returns me a different eigenvalue every time I try to understand it (let’s pretend we have the ability to revert a quantum mechanical system). After all, I may choose not to understand, and perhaps then, I would understand more.
How to be different?
When I was small, small enough that I remember I was small, I always wanted to be different from my peers. I wanted to be received as different, weird, and unusual. I disliked a lot of people, because I thought they were too normal. Bold of me to even know what is normal, right? At some point later in my life, I had a thought. What if everyone else also wanted to be different? But in the end, due to the probabilistic nature of the world, they actually chose to be normal, because they realized that being different would only make them normal again. I was scared because if what I had thought was true, I was behind in how I thought, and I was the only ordinary person in the world. In other words, I hated myself because of how I disliked others… Isn’t this paradoxical?