if you had photographic memory, what would you do with it?
this was the question that started the whole thing.
for context, we were talking about Suits. yup, the tv show. mike ross and his freakishly good memory had somehow come up, and somewhere between the fake-lawyer discourse and whatever else we were talking about, i started wondering what a person would actually do with a brain like that.
my answer? astrophysics.
i was thinking, with a brain as powerful as that, maybe concepts like event horizons and past/future light cones would actually stay in my head instead of immediately evaporating.
now. i don’t know why i said this.
i’ve never seriously considered becoming an astrophysicist. i wasn’t one of those kids who was fascinated by the moon and stars. i’m not secretly doing tensor calculus recreationally. i don’t look at an equation and feel anything except threatened.
the closest explanation i can come up with is that around 4 years ago, i tried reading stephen hawking’s a brief history of time and made it about halfway through before i was forced to admit that my brain was not built for whatever was happening on those pages.
i remember having to re-read entire pages. slowly. sometimes more than once. i understood individual english words and yet, arranged in that particular order, they appeared to be describing information my puny, mortal, non-photographic brain was bouncing around as one continuous huh???
i never quite got over that. because as you can see, 4 years later, somebody mentions photographic memory in a conversation about a goddamn tv show, and somehow my first thought was gravity and general relativity.
ground control for whatever this is
btw this is the mother post for everything astrophysics-related i will eventually write on this blog. “mother post” because it will birth other posts. don’t think about it too hard.
i’m keeping all the topics i want to write about in this blog post, partly so they’re easy to find and partly because putting them somewhere public feels like an effective way to bully myself into actually writing them (assuming i ever survive the research process and manage to arrange my thoughts into sentences).
each one will get its own post and a link!
and here are the things the universe is doing that i think we should discuss
- we are made of star stuff
- what the fuck is spacetime, first of all
- why time counts as a dimension when i cannot simply walk backward through friday
- general relativity aka THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
- there are HOW MANY dimensions now????
- the universe is expanding. into WHAT.
- the god particle
- the ctrl+z particle
- what if this is not the only universe. cute! fun! good luck proving that one!
- AND OF COURSE STRING THEORY BABYYYY
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