{"id":4166,"date":"2018-12-30T22:01:18","date_gmt":"2018-12-30T22:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/?p=4166"},"modified":"2018-12-30T22:01:18","modified_gmt":"2018-12-30T22:01:18","slug":"notes-from-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/2018\/12\/30\/notes-from-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes From Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

Time is a funny thing. As physics students, we learn that our most basic assumption of time is, in fact, true: its silent immutability, that cold, heartless pace of the clock, is a lie. Of course, time doesn\u2019t actually run slower in a queue, when one minute feels like five, or run faster in an exam, when the last five minutes feel like one; spacetime is warped by inertia, not boredom. But even if this agreement between perception and reality is coincidental, the subject makes for some thinking.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing this from home, 14 days and 500 miles away from Imperial, and though there is much to celebrate about being back \u2013 not having to cook every meal, or being around people who actually know how to iron, or simply just being able to get up at noon without feeling guilty \u2013 there is equally a curious feeling of trying to peddle back lost time. The autumn term lasted 10 weeks, or 70 days, or 1680 hours, or 6048000 ticks of the clock, but you can\u2019t quantify, really, how fast and how slow that runs. In that time, for example, you will learn to cook, if you haven\u2019t already, and you will spend an eternity chopping fruit and veg \u2013 if you doubt that, I assure you that I now have enough scars on my hands to prove it. You will answer infinitely many questions, or really the same questions an infinite number of times \u2013 what you\u2019re doing, where you\u2019re from, where you went to school, where exactly the English accent comes from if you\u2019re supposed to be Scottish (that one might just be me). You will make your morning walk to campus more times than you could possibly count, in sun and rain and in glee and despair and boredom and, in the last few days, contemplation.<\/p>\n

Because Cantor proved a hundred years ago or so that our infinities are bounded; that we cannot count all the numbers between one and two, and yet we can still pass them all \u2013 it\u2019s the first maths we learn, to jump up to three and four and five and yet on, leaving infinities unexplored in our wake. An infinity can be bounded by the finite, and that\u2019s the lesson of ten weeks. You will find the time more than the sum of its parts; you will find the time to miss your family (but maybe not quite as much you\u2019d think you would), to spend hours amongst the spires of London, or in the oppressive quiet of the galleries, or in the shadows of morning waiting for the sun to rise, and you will even find the time to do your degree \u2013 though it will never feel like you have quite enough time for it.<\/p>\n

So, in our little infinity of ten weeks, what changes? Everything and nothing, of course. You are still you. But you are a different you; most importantly, you\u2019re an independent you. And that freedom deserves emphasis: that shared history, all the time that came before, is lost to everyone else at Imperial. You are no longer defined as a sibling or a child or a cousin, but as a housemate and a student and a blank slate \u2013 you are free, in effect, to largely redefine yourself however you want. It\u2019s freedom, but you lose a sense of familiarity for a while. And, of course, it takes some time.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
This doesn’t have anything to do with the post, but I needed a photo and the Christmas decorations around Wilson House deserve to be seen.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There\u2019s one last concept in physics pertinent to this discussion: entropy. Entropy is a degree of the \u2018disorder\u2019 of a system*, and, critically, it cannot decrease in a closed system. This increase is time\u2019s immutable arrow, and it is the difference between the past and the future.<\/p>\n

And so, when I say that, back at home, you feel an effort to peddle back time, what I mean to say is that you feel a need to decrease the entropy of the situation, and to pretend that the last ten weeks \u2013 an amount of time at once negligible and hyperbolically significant \u2013 didn\u2019t happen. But perception tells us this is impossible, and so does physics. You will miss the contours of life before university, but that is the invariable price of change, of growth, and of time. And change and growth, of course, are not loss: you are still a child and a sibling and a cousin and all your other identities, and though a different you will wear those labels, they will wear them just as well.<\/p>\n

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is it takes coming home to realise just how much you grow at university, and just how much you’ve seen. And, if you feel like becoming more mature seems like one task too many on top of studying, going out, exercising, exploring and all the other little infinities of Imperial, don’t worry: there’s world enough and time yet.<\/p>\n

*This is a vast oversimplification. It\u2019s not my fault I don\u2019t understand my degree well enough to properly explain it.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Time is a funny thing. As physics students, we learn that our most basic assumption of time is, in fact, true: its silent immutability, that cold, heartless pace of the clock, is a lie. Of course, time doesn\u2019t actually run slower in a queue, when one minute feels like five, or run faster in an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1319,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[270162,125740,142,96143],"tags":[11630,299792,150],"class_list":["post-4166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-270162","category-actual-physics","category-london","category-musings","tag-imperial-college-london","tag-its-about-time","tag-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1319"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4166"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4170,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4166\/revisions\/4170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}