January was horrible. It was so bad I even went to the Quickstep meeting in Islington a couple of times – actually it’s a nice group and I will be going back. It was grey, it was cold, it was wet, it was scuttling through the back streets to get to Blackfriars Bridge and hoping I could get a bus to Liverpool Street rather than have to travel on the ram-jammed Central Line.
I spent a lot of the month wading through some philosophy of science in a book called Cosmopolitics, by Isabelle Stengers, a Belgian chemist-turned-philosopher of science who was a pupil of Iliya Prigogine. It’s written in that fluent post-modern French style that’s as slippery as a fish – every time I think I get what she’s saying, it slips away from me. It’s in two volumes, and it feels like she discusses a lot, but when I try to summarise what I think she’s said… nothing happens. This is not a satisfying reading experience. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is by contrast snappy and to the point.
Another chunk went on trying to understand the Riemann-Roch theorem. Not the modern proofs, which aren’t that difficult, or the ideas that go into the proofs, which I suspect are simpler than all the formal frippery make out. I want to understand why it should be true – because when you take a really naive approach to estimating the dimension of a function with n poles and m zeros of varying degrees, you don’t wind up subtracting the degrees of the poles from the degrees of the zeros. How on earth did Riemann think of it? Nowhere, and I mean nowhere, will you find an intuitive explanation of this theorem, let alone why the original proof used Dirichelt’s principle, which is about solutions to the Poisson equation! Index theorems – which R-R is an example of – are deeply tied to PDE’s – the Atayah-Singer theorem uses the Dirac equation (!) – but you’d never guess it from the usual literature. This is frustrating, especially as the project of the series is to provide just such an explanation.
Another chunk went on being not-quite-right in the body and mind. One Wednesday morning in mid-January, I swear I nearly turned round, went home and called in with ME. I had practically no will to tackle the world. Let alone the daily journey to Liverpool Street. The previous evening I had actually dismounted from the bike twenty minutes early in my spin class – I didn’t do that when I first started. I had just Lost It. I took lots of early evenings and did little gym. I took a long weekend at the end of the month, and started to feel stronger and more able to take on the world.
A lot of time went on two hefty – by my standards – projects at work. One of them was a “despite” project – one you get done despite the tool set and data you have, not because of it (if you don’t know what that means, get a job in a retail bank). The other was / is a report where the presentation is as important as the data – long story. Day after day went past with no visible progress and a lot of effort. I solved one of the problems recently and can concentrate on the next one.
Whatever it was I got before Christmas was more than just the cold and fever that laid me out over the holiday week. It’s made my breathing rough – I can barely breathe well enough to run on the treadmill for more than a mile. Some of it was cold and fever, and some of it is something else.
Soon after I wake up, I think “I can’t go on doing this”. It passes, but it’s real. I don’t like the City – like all west Londoners, I get hives if I have to travel East of the Kingsway for any length of time. I read some research that found that rooms with low ceilings are good for doing transactional, routine tasks, but to do any thinking you need higher ceilings. The ceilings in our new office feel about as high as the galleys of the Cutty Sark. Some of me is prepared to get used to it, but the rest of me wants nothing to do with it. There’s the real conflict. I haven't felt entirely fit and well since we moved there.
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