FROM THE CLOUDS ❖ Comprehending the universe is hard, honest work
truth-seeking and programming
I started programming when I was nine, but I don’t touch it anymore. The funny thing about it is that I don’t really miss too much about the tactics of it, but I do miss the state of mind that you inhabit in that dogged pursuit of a verifiable solution.
In programming-world, you can ask questions about the limitations of something and verify or falsify it rapidly: ‘At which point does this function break?’, or, ‘What can’t be accomplished within this logic?’ and then you can usually work out, or at least hone in on an existing answer for it. Most of it, anyway, unless you are smart enough to come up with those problems that reside outside of established epistemics (I was not).
At the core of that truth-seeking, I think, is also a desire for emotional comfort; the proof of even just one case where the chaos of reality reigned into a comprehensible size. Living inside of a software engineering brain was like pouring that amorphous, emotional, infinite consciousness into a perfectly bounded box. The curve that bounds the sum of infinite parts, or the recursive function itself as some kind of metaphorical mathematical proof that the infinite is in fact tamable and domesticable, resolvable to a discrete solution.
Becca Rothfield writes:
All things are too small, not just to hold me, but to hold anything. Cups are too small, which is why they demand such relentless refilling. Bodies are too small to encompass more than a sole inhabitant … Books can be big - most of the best ones are - yet even the most encyclopedic affairs are too small to encompass the whole of the world’s wild machinery.
There was this existential wildness in the spirit in the original Nerds of Yore when I read their biographies growing up: Evariste Galois dying in a gun duel over a girl, after he spent all night writing up every proof he’d ever come up with in the face of his possible demise; Alan Turing, eating a poisoned apple after a government that he’d likely saved with his invention forcibly castrated him with synthetic estrogen to supposedly correct his homosexual desires; Michio Kaku building an atom smasher in his parents' garage after learning that Einstein had never completed his unified field theory.
I’ve always liked scientists, though I probably slightly more of an artist, because I think the fundamental compulsion to understand and harness the universe impossibly into an object of love is there all the same. Futility is also the birth of passion, at least when it does not destroy us; it pulls us in like a black hole. Or maybe better said here:
