Friday, May 15, 2009

Wordsmithing

I don't know what to tell you. It looks like working on one's dissertation is deadly to the blogging life.

I went to Philly again last weekend, for another writing retreat. I don't know what I'll do when my writing partner finishes, as she is sure to do in the next few months. I like to think that I'm quite an efficient worker. I get more done when I work at home than when I go to school, which shows some amount of discipline. But it just doesn't compare to having someone else in the room, working every minute you do. If I goof off, she'll catch me. I always feel exhausted at the end of two days of heavy-duty writing, but the results are worth it.

I've also been working on my Very Last Class paper. Ever. As I think I've already mentioned, this semester I've been taking my last required class, and now all that is left is the final paper. Writing it has been excruciating, as it makes me realize how little I understand about the subject. (Which is to be expected, of course, as this is the only class I've ever taken in philosophy.) But I must say that I'm starting to have sympathy for the physicists and philosophers who argue that we shouldn't try to make sense of quantum mechanics, because it just can't be done. I don't think my professor will accept that as the thesis of my paper, but the quantum world is just so different than the regular (classical) world that it's frightfully hard to come to terms with it.

5 comments:

Bernice said...

Do you need me to come for a weekend to crack the whip when your friend is not longer doing it? Maybe all of your blog readers could take a turn. What fun that would be!

unclem-nm said...

Bernice - How could you accuse all her readers of being so sadistic as to want to be taking turns cracking the whip on her writing.

I'll take the third Wed and Thu of each month. Extra whip cracks if I catch her drinking iced tea with her wine.

alexis said...

no wonder I can never grasp even the popcorn physics books..

stef said...

Thank goodness I have no idea what you're talking about. Quantuam-wise or classics-wide

Matty Lau said...

I think that quantum mechanics is understandable in an intuitive way- just not by me. I think that it probably requires a very different understanding of the world, in which case, then classical mechanics wouldn't make any sense to you any more.