Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Scientific inquisition
It is difficult to talk about the things that I like because you see them in my works. They are in my paintings, in my radio theaters, in my papers. It is easier for me to talk about things that I don't like. I mean I cannot describe what I like in words. They are more interesting than words.
But in all, I do not like to engage in telling some useless stories in my papers about towards this theory and that theory. I like to be mystified by physical world instead of ordering to the reality on how it should be. I don't like to arouse the readers of my papers emotionally or give them some advices about how should he or she study from now on. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt that he or she is ignorant and there are a lot to learn before thinking about nature. These are things I don't like to read in papers written by others as well. I think a good paper is one that has a lasting power and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave reading it.
There are lots of papers that seem to be boring but they are decent pieces of science. On the other hand, there are papers written by sometimes famous people that nail you to your seat in your office when you read it and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything. I have experienced this feeling in the near past and now I feel I am cheated. These are the well-written papers that took me hostage! I absolutely don't like the papers in which the scientist provoke his or her readers with some fake calculations that artificially describe what was raised by that great mind in a seminar as an imaginary problem of some imaginary concepts.
I have to confess there are some papers in my office right now that have made me doze off when I read them, but the same papers have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kind of papers I like.
I have imaginations but there are differences between illusion and reality. Not everything I imagine will be found in nature even if they are linked to theoretical physics. I can't tell you what part of me is reality and what part is illusion, or why I've had this game of vacillation from reality to illusion and back to reality in my ordinary life, not necessarily as a physicist. The capacity to dream is the most important human characteristic, shared not proportionality but enough for each. Though all of us dream, only a very few of us can write it in the form of formulae.
Imagination is one of the most extraordinary gifts granted to human beings. But, why must we dream? I think, we resort to dreaming at times when we are unhappy with our circumstances. And how extraordinary is it that no dictatorship in research institutions can control it?
Obviously there is a scientific inquisition running in some of the academic research institutes even where freedom in science is being advertised from. However, it is surely true these only can affect the most boring part of science. No interesting part that really exists let the scientific inquisition control a true scientist's fantasies. They can throw you in a jail (i. e. a dark well) of ideas, but you still have the ability to live your sentence outside the prison without anyone holding you there. Through the imagination, you can pass over the insurmountable walls of stupid ideas without leaving any trace of yourself, and you can always go back. Now the question is, once out why we go back?
Physics is the science of reality not imagination, Mohammad!
ReplyDeleteThanks Mohammad, it’s really a nice article trying to define boundary between reality and illusion.
ReplyDeleteBut I believe that everything that we can imagine is a matter of reality. There are many things that could not be materialized but are real. Illusion is part of reality that if we want to realize it, we should change our level of view and also we should be mobilized to new abilities.
Sorry my English language is little to present my findings, however discussion on such subjects would not easy even in my native language.
Be happy and strong
Hadi