Miscellaneous updates and thoughts on the future
Life has been amazingly full for me of late. I am now running a programming business called Sharp Logic and have been doing a fair bit of private tutoring and music teaching (at least until the school year let out). I have also been very active with my band (Enso, which just started work on our first full length album) and am on the board of our island's new and expanding food coop. And best of all I get to do all of this in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
Wonderful as things are, I continue to feel the calling of mathematics. With every thought of Galois Theory, large cardinals or the Euler identity I feel the floor falling out from under my feet, the space between the atoms of my body exploding into infinity. It's a magical sensation which I treasure but rarely get to share with others. I do find occasion to impart bits and pieces with bright students and curious friends, but often wish that there was a stronger community of individuals around me with the same level of passion and/or depth of understanding. Consequently, I at times have felt torn between my little island shire and the great mathematical adventure that I feel lies on the horizons.
This conflict was not new for me - I have always had such a wide range of passions and interests. Things took a twist though when I saw a TED video of Steve Jobs speaking at a Standford graduation ceremony. He spoke of following your heart, finding what you love and of using the knowledge of your death as a tool in living life to it's fullest. In particular, he conveyed that death ensures that nothing is permanent - we all loose everything eventually, so why hold back in life out of fear of loosing something? The truth is, we have nothing to loose that isn't destined to be lost to us eventually. For a moment I found my conflict dissolve and realized that significantly furthering my knowledge of mathematics is something that definitely I want to do before I die.
With all of this in mind I started thinking again about graduate school. The difficulty here is that I am greatly displeased with much of the academy. I dislike the egotism, the hoops, the weeding out and the transmutation of humans into academic cogs, machines designed for the function of paper writing. Furthermore, all of this has been accentuated in light of the current economic situation. Not only has funding been cut, thereby reducing the number of available positions, but there are more applicants now that the financial sector has released it's quants from their employment. This has exacerbated the competition and made entry more difficult than ever.
Wondering whether or not there might be an alternative I imagined myself working to attain PhD level mastery of mathematics in all the spare time that I don't have between the zillion things I have going on in my life. I also began to imagine the lack of other individuals who I could work with in achieving my goals who lived on the island. Graduate school, at least for mathematics and science PhD students, is effectively paid for and puts you in direct contact with a large community of individuals who share your passions.
Questioning all of these matters segued into conversations with a good friend of mine named Paul Lessard, another mathematics student who at the time was working on getting into graduate school (he has since been accepted to a graduate program in Vermont). His similar distaste for the negative aspects of the academy were coupled with deep convictions about how these negative aspects cater and are endemic to more deeply rooted social issues. We began to dream of another way of supporting individuals who wish to pursue knowledge, one that has the potential to counteract the downfalls of the academy and promote the kind of consciousness necessary to heal the planet. We agreed that if we did go through the academy that we would only do so en route to meeting the challenge of reshaping the world into a more positive and healthy place.
Inspiration further peaked when I came across Antony Garrett Lisi, a sort of renegade physicist who, disillusioned with the overemphasis of String Theory in theoretical physics research opted after receiving his PhD not to remain in the academy but to live in Hawaii in his van, surf, engage in adventure sports and research theoretical physics independently. The product of this decision and the awarding of a FQXi grant to pursue his studies was his paper, An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything. The title of this paper is a play on the approach taken towards his crafting of a GUT - the theory considers elementary particles as the symmetries of the E8 lie group, which is one of several exceptional simple Lie groups and is considered one of the most beautiful structures in the entirety of mathematics - certainly, it would be fitting if such an aesthetically pleasing structure turned out to be intimately related to the very structure of the universe. Through his renegade lifestyle Lisi has developed the notion of a "science hostel", a place where scientists and mathematicians could live closer to nature and remain active in their research passions.
Though I sense that Lisi's vision has a somewhat different scope than that which Pual and I have developed, it was a clear indication that we are not alone in the general direction of our goals and that there are individuals who are able to make significant contributions to the fields of math and science from outside of the academy.
Possible as it may be right now to establish the sort of organization or network which Paul and I have envisioned, it is almost certain that it would take a significant amount of time to do so, further postponing the actual research and studies which I seek. It will also most likely be easier to carry out such an establishment with the clout of a PhD in tow. This means leaving my shire, my band and the community which I have come to love.
Adventure awaits..
