Failure is a Must

This week I disproved the very premise of the work I’ve been doing for the past four months. It’s all bullshit, and now there will be no paper and likely no conference in Poland. The worst part is that in retrospect the problem is so obvious it hurts. I took the boss a one line proof that we both stared at in silence for several minutes, defeated, and then with shrug I get, “Well, there’s an ample supply of stupid. No getting around that. All we can do is try to tap into the scarce supply of smart.” Your average Ph.D. will admit that they could reproduce all of the work in their thesis in about 6 months time. The other three and a half years are devoted to figuring out exactly what work to do, and it’s a painful process of trial-and-error. I guess I’ve got four months of that done; could have been more.

Yesterday one of the campus bars closed down and there was a party to finish the kegs. I met some random crew of mechanical engineers who were over the top. These guys built a robot that mixes drinks in precise proportions and volumes, and wrote a program that uses machine learning techniques to invent new drinks based on people’s ratings of its previous efforts. They were drunks, every one of them, and they loved to sit around and elaborate on ridiculous ideas, like getting ransom from NASA on the threat of defacing historical moon landing sites. We’re to imagine a rover with a mounted feather duster poised delicately over Neil Armstrong’s footprints. For the first Friday in a long time I was entertained instead of entertaining and it was good.

Thanks to whoever found Babylon Circus. I daresay Au Marche Des Illusions is as good as Underdog World Strike.

Inconceivable

"The importance of this discovery for the development of the human mind lay in the fact that the earth, mankind, and the individual ego became dethroned. The earth became a satellite of the sun which carried around in space the peoples swarming on it. Similar planets of equal importance accompanied it, describing orbits about the sun. Man was no longer important in the universe, except to himself. None of these amazing facts arose from ordinary experience (such as the confirmation of a round earth by circumnavigation of the globe), but from observations which were, for the time in question, very delicate and subtle and from accurate calculations of planetary orbits. At any rate, the evidence was such as was neither accessible to all men nor of importance to everyday life. Visual evidence, intuitive perception, sacred and pagan tradition alike all spoke against the new doctrine. In place of the visible disk of the sun the new doctrine puts a ball of fire, gigantic beyond imagination; in place of the friendly lights of the sky, similar balls of fire at inconceivable distances, or spheres like the earth, that reflect light from other sources; and all immediate sense impressions were to be regarded as deception, whereas immeasurable distances and incredible velocities were to represent the true state of affairs. Yet this new doctrine was destined to be victorious. For it drew its power from the burning desire of all thinking minds to comprehend all things in the material world—be they ever so unimportant for human existence—by simple, unambiguous, though abstract, concepts. In this process, which constitutes the essence of scientific research, the human spirit never hesitates nor fears to doubt the most self-evident facts of visual perception and to declare them to be illusions, but prefers to resort to the most extreme abstractions rather than exclude from the scientific description of nature one established fact, however insignificant it might seem."

-Max Born on the Copernican system