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Monday, August 31, 2009

moving and the symplectic camel

Yeah, yeah, more about this tedious moving process, whereby I reduce my digital, physical and mental footprint, so that I can cross the sea and find peace in a new land.
A recent paper someone forwarded to me:
"Symplectic capacities and the geometry of uncertainty: The irruption of symplectic topology in classical and quantum mechanics"
One of the main points is the story of the symplectic camel, that sad creature who could not pass through the eye of the needle. It is in fact a relatively recent rigorous result (Gromov's non-squeezing theorem) about symplectic geometry.
Basically it says that whatever your initial projection onto the different phase planes, a canonical transformation will never decrease, only increase them.
So, yes, I suppose this means that I should get rid of stuff. The connection is obvious, right?

On a different, not really related subject, I just finished reading Alan Watts' "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are".
Some parts really resonated with me, though at times it put me in that kind of trance where he could say just about anything, and I'd nod slowly with a blank stare. No, actually, it did that remarkably little. The image of self as the universe playing hide and seek with itself is an interesting one.

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