NerdGuru

(Source: silviamireya89)

Lets celebrate this week as Feynman Week!

May 11th is his birthday! 

“I gotta stop somewhere, I will leave you something to imagine……………..” 

Quote from BBC Horizon Documentary ” The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” and the picture is a retouched screen shot from the documentary “The Quest For Tanna Tuva/ The Last Journey of a Genius”.

Richard Feynman passed away 3 days later, after concluding the filming of ‘Tanna Tuva’. 

The smile on his face and his gestures and the bongos( I have ORANGE JUICE :D) all project happiness and charisma of this larger than life image,hard to imagine that he was battling two rare forms of cancer.

The background image is a picture of the Very Large Telescope [VLT]”s Unit Telescope operating its laser tracker.

Nietzsche is easily one of the major influences in my life. Such pristine expression of human thoughts and emotions decked in logic and charm both finds no parallel.

While we are sitting here comfortably in our homes, people are being butchered, children and women are being made to fight the front line. Billions of dollars are being wasted.

We call soldiers patriots, people who cold blooded killed other equally valiant soldiers!

We live in a time where we are standing rigid for the next battle and our ephemeral peace it an excuse to reload our guns!

Wake up! Stop This Madness! Peace is just around the corner; we are just not looking hard enough!

Carl Sagan on Cannabis :

I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try.

There’s a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there’s another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part.

I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it’s my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to.

Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I’ve had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humour.

Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word “crazy” to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us.

When I’m high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.

Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.

“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Meet J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb, chief contributor at the Manhattan Project.

A tall, thin chain smoker, who often neglected to eat during periods of intense thought and concentration, Oppenheimer was marked by many of his friends as having self-destructive tendencies.

Plagued throughout his life by periods of depression, Oppenheimer once told his brother, “I need physics more than friends”

He was known for being too enthusiastic in discussion, sometimes to the point of taking over seminar sessions.

He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in March 1927 at age 23. After the oral exam, James Franck, the professor administering, reportedly said, “I’m glad that’s over. He was on the point of questioning me.”

He never wrote a long paper or did a long calculation, anything of that kind. He didn’t have patience for that; his own work consisted of little aperçus, but quite brilliant ones. But he inspired other people to do things, and his influence was fantastic

Oppenheimer’s diverse interests sometimes interrupted his focus on projects. In 1933 he learned Sanskrit and met the Indologist Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley. He read the Bhagavad Gita in the original language and later he cited it as one of the books that most shaped his philosophy of life.

The FBI added Oppenheimer to its Custodial Detention Index, for arrest in case of national emergency, and listed him as “Nationalistic Tendency: Communist.”

Oppenheimer never was involved in espionage for the Soviet Union. The KGB tried repeatedly to recruit him, but was never successful; Oppenheimer did not betray the United States. In addition, he had several persons removed from the Manhattan project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union.

Oppenheimer did important research in theoretical astronomy (especially as related to general relativity and nuclear theory), nuclear physics, spectroscopy, and quantum field theory, including its extension into quantum electrodynamics. The formal mathematics of relativistic quantum mechanics also attracted his attention, although he doubted its validity. His work predicted many later finds, which include the neutron, meson and neutron star.

Oppenheimer also made important contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers and started work that eventually led to descriptions of quantum tunneling.

Oppenheimer’s papers were considered difficult to understand even by the standards of the abstract topics he was expert in. He was fond of using elegant, if extremely complex, mathematical techniques to demonstrate physical principles, though he was sometimes criticized for making mathematical mistakes, presumably out of haste. “His physics was good”, said his student Snyder, “but his arithmetic awful.”

Oppenheimer published only five scientific papers, one of which was in biophysics, after World War II, and none after 1950.

Years later he would explain why that verse entered his head at the time of the Trinity Explosion: namely, the famous verse: “kālo’smi lokakṣayakṛtpravṛddho lokānsamāhartumiha pravṛttaḥ”, which he translated as “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

In 1965, he was persuaded to quote again for a television broadcast:

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

High school’ s over and now its time for the real books!

So, you are an engineer? Look what this man has to say about it!

You argument is invalid

[P.S: On a personal note, this is just a testimony to the fact I hope to take a good decision in the extremely near future!]

Listen to me. We’re here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We’re creating a completely new consciousness, like an artist or a poet. We’re rewriting the history of human thought with what we’re doing. That’s how you have to think of this. ……..#nerdyNoirOriginal