mathematics, android, and java

Got some crazy amount of work out of my way today. Most of it had to do with physical simulation of turbulent physical systems, (like the burning plasma) under some incredibly high energy situations. Days like this, I don't really feel as if I've been doing physics really. I feel more like I've been toiling over with computer problems and computer simulation of physical problems (which is a complicated enough that it should be, and is, considered a whole separate branch of academic venue. There are people out there spending their whole lives just trying to 'visualize' what other people are doing in the often crazy large or insanely small world of natural sciences). My primary tool of the trade is mathematica, the program which usually costs around thousands of dollars for a single license (and they complain about pirates!) but which my school had been generous enough to issue me a free license (as is the case with most educational institutions). Mathematica, especially at its recent iteration of version 7.0, is a marvelous program. It does practically anything you can imagine with mathematics, including image manipulation and all sorts of physical and mathematical simulations. One of the more interesting projects created using the mathematica is a simulation of the sound that would have been made at the time of the big bang (which is physically impossible, no oxygen and all, so all this is a very theoretical exercise) that was made as a toy for a kid by his physicist father. there are all sorts of crazy and amusing examples that I don't have the time and the space to mention, but I do remember about half of the population at the synthetic biology conference 4.0 to be carrying a copy in their laptops doing things like DNA origami and such. For those of you out there who are not pirates and still want to get their hands on the software the Wolfram research (the guy who made the program, Stephen Wolfram, is quite a character in his own right) is toying around with an interesting business model of offering Mathematica 7 home edition for about two hundred dollars to regular users not affiliated with research institutions or schools. The home edition, despite its rather unfortunate namesake, is the same version as the 'professional' version, except that it's not supposed to be used in academic presentations, so it's a real great bargain.

I don't really love Mathematica as a platform (too much). I hate the fact that despite all it offers, it's a closed sourced application, and in the scientific world it means if you screw up once, it will be big, since there will be no way for third party observers to verify the results of a cruicial experiment, like going through the algorithms and figuring out how exactly certain inquiry or simulation ended up with certain type of result. As the things stand, mathematica is a magic black box we aren't allowed to pry open, and that is a very ominous thing that sits in the corner of my mind whenever I use the program (which is a lot).
The main reason why I cling to mathematica is quite frankly because it's about the best way to get down and dirty with complex high-order mathematics, unless you want to go all 19th century on me with real sculpted models of topology and bundle after bundle of papers with arcane equations (both of which are still in use today, by the way). Mathematics is music without the distraction of sound. It's the pursuit of something that's quite unknown and not well understood, to the extent that we still cannot figure out whether it's in us or outside us, whether it has something to do with how life-like systems in this universe came to be or if all an elaborate illusion, a game of chances that might have happened in some other form we cannot even begin to imagine (really, is it impossible picture the universe where the natural outcome of a number after one is not two but three hundred twenty eight thousand six hundred twenty seven point o nine two six five? How will the physical system work in such universes? Mathematics allows us to explore even such absurd possibilities).
Analogy of mathematics as music without sound is really quite poignant when you think about it. Music isn't random for some reason. It's not the simple matter of harmonics. Human ears, and quite possibly animal senses, are only capable of recognizing certain types of frequencies as notes, the elementary composition of all musical structures. Anything that deviates from that frequency is considered noise, and does not form into a coherent structure. Such odd case of emergence abounds in all fields of mathematics and sciences, including the curious case of the number of elementary particles in physics, and the existence of their subspecies, like muon and tau-muon which are heavier cousins of common electron which manifest at certain energy levels (all the characteristics except mass are the same), though not in any other energy levels. It really is just like how musics comes to manifest itself within the twilight realm of physics, mathematics, and aesthetic perfection, something that's so vital to the state of (perhaps, even, salvation of?) human species yet remains mysteriously out of reach for all of us.
I didn't always like mathematics, but now I can't understand how people can actually come to hate mathematics. Perhaps the inane educational system and all their pathetic assumptions of human nature are to blame (mold children into decent human beings? Who are they to judge other human beings as indecent?). Perhaps it's the problem of resource allocation. What I do know, however, is that if anyone is capable of determining something as beautiful, not as in wanting to have an intercourse with it (though that urge is definitely part of most of human endeavor) but in being able to stand in silent awe of the object/idea, then that person has innate affinity for mathematics. If you are capable of looking at an art work, or listen to a melody, or even, just get immersed in the world and find something around you to be beautiful, then you are doing something that had been intimately linked with mathematics since the beginning of human civilization.
Which is all the more reason why I cannot understand or accept the current division between arts and sciences. Most people seem to say something along the lines of how one thing is dependent on creativity while the other is dependent on cold hard logical reasoning. Those people are making a mistake so many mainstream journalists make when writing on the matters of science, arts, and mind. They are confused between technician and a scientist/artists. Technician spends his/her days in a lab working out intimate details of whatever he/she is a technician of, building things and making them work. Scientists on the other hand, spends most of his/her time waiting for the muse. Science thrives on breakthrough ideas and creativity, not blindly rotating test tubes for six hours a day only to go back home and worry about 'everyday lives.' Arts and scientists both need their muse and the fact had been noted since the ancient times, where in most depictions of mythological inspirations for the arts almost always include a patron of mathematics among their number. Depicting scientists as dependent only on logical reasoning and attention to dry and tasteless detail is the same as depicting artists as wall-painters (though I must say, some artists are like wall-painters). Current state of separation between the arts and sciences is a travesty that will be changed into something else in the very near future.  

So I've been practically typing and jotting down notes for about five to six hours straight, most if not all of them related to the mathematics and physics problems, and my personal pet project (which I hope would turn me into a certifiable mad scientist) of physical simulation of inorganic life-like systems of thermodynamic emphasis. I've been doing so much work lately that I'm actually beginning to worry about wearing out the letterings of the keyboard on my laptop... Yet all this is not enough to quench my intellectual curiosity it seems. I'm beginning to learn the android OS. Well, coding for it at least. I'm not remotely skilled enough as a Java coder (really, my last experience with Java was about two or three years ago when I had a brief affair with the openscience framework) so I'm really beginning from square one. I didn't even have most of the necessary Java developer libraries on my computer so had to go out and hunt them down individually (for some reason google themselves doesn't really offer all-in-one downloadable package), and get the compatible distribution of the eclipse IDE for Java, define new path variables and etc. One thing that consistently went through my mind was, how easy would all these things (and more things to come) would be if I was on OS X or linux, I guess it can't be helped. I'm rather sick of looking at Vista choking on three gig of ram. I have most of the requisite libraries and programs up and running right now. I know that being modern technology, something will go wrong at some point that will lead me to tear my hair out a bit, but that's the risk you should be prepared for in any endeavor that involves computers, no (I do distinctly remember the days when using more elaborate kinds of word processors were a thrilling activity in themselves due to the incredible unreliability of underlying operating systems)? I've already gone through my share of 'hello world' equivalent on the emulator, though being a iconoclast I didn't do 'hello world,' I did 'close the world, open the nExt' (all but one of my RL friends got that reference... I'm a little happy for some reason), which worked out marvelously after some number of errors were cleaned out. You might be surprised at how fast this came to be, but it's rather simple. As long as you have some sort of programming experience, even HTML, all the rest of the programming languages begin to come naturally (to certain extent). And most of the Java stuff is really python with whole lot of organizing and inane amount of typing involved to get even the simplest of tasks done (which is where the eclipse IDE comes into relieve the pain). I still have a lot to learn, but the process had been interesting enough that I am beginning to think that I made a prudent decision which might even be financially beneficial at some distant point in the future. I'm thinking of implementing some of the physical simulation algorithms I have in my old computer physics simulation 101 textbook in android. It would be cool to have a mobile platform that can run numerical simulations of relatively complex physical systems on the spot, fully configurable (like mathematica, but more user-friendly), perhaps even with some biology or medical applications (utilizing the basic physics algorithms, shouldn't be impossible). Turning all android os based devices into potential mobile field lab sounds extremely enervating to me.... Now that I think about it, maybe I should consider getting a developer model G1 phone, though with so many android phones coming up in the horizon it might not be such a smart move. I think I've been going through some weird phase lately. I just feel really intellectually stimulated. Perhaps I'm about the reach the golden age of my life? I've been getting through incredible amount of workload in school, holding down multiple jobs (though in this economy that shouldn't come as a surprise), hunting down all sorts of study materials and actually getting through them, studying all sorts of things like android OS development and synthetic biology study materials, both of which are outside my field of expertise. I've been listening to how scientists bloom early and artists/writers bloom late in their career (and really, most scientists made their greatest achievements when they were in their twenties, early thirties. They mostly rode on their reputation after that. Look at Einstein for example), from all kinds of sources including textbooks and radio interviews. Maybe I'm upto something. Maybe I might really be able to achieve something in my twenties... Who knows? the future is always uncertain. It's not just in field of academy and programming that I've been boosting in. I'm also reading through a lot of books, much faster than before. I've read through three books since last monday, in addition to all the physics texts and references I usually dig through. All three of the books were written by Neil Gaiman though (American Gods, the Graveyard Book, the Smokes and Mirrors), interesting works of fiction which might be the reason why I got through them so fast (it's really easy to read through fictions, though I slow down to a crawl when going through some of the more intense scholarly texts). I'm also writing voraciously. Not just things about life and nothing I'm writing here. Fully pledged essays and stories and whatnot, though their qualities aren't really anything to be amazed about. Is this really a new phase of life that I'm going through or is this a one time thing, like how some strange drug got mixed up in my daily coffee or I'm on some long-term sugar high from all those chocolates? I'm hoping it's not the later.