西哲课的老师说逻各斯，我就随手记成了Logus，后来看书知道错了，应该是Logos，那天在励耘班群里老师提到nebula，我想起nebulae，他说-a的复数是-ae，这种形式我是知道的，比如alga与algae，但是还有-um的变成复数是-a，所以看到词尾是-a的就不知道怎么办了。拉丁语课阴性阳性名词的六个格都在我还没选上课的两节中讲过去了，不知是否可以解释这些问题，但我有些犹豫要不要直接去学，有些东西以前注意得太少，碎片积累得不够，缺直觉的感受，就不知是否该一个规则下去只剩“例外”，好像认知过程少了些什么，尽管我也不知认知过程该是怎样的，于是又崇拜起C.M.来……

西哲、拉丁语、经典电影赏析（其实我是想借这门课了解一点艺术方面的理论），这学期的三门选修课，都算是计划了很久想学的东西，真的开始了还是有胆怯。不过尽力学就是，反正本来我也不推崇什么“循序渐进”。有个大轮廓，里面的东西用一辈子来填来体会。

生物的状态也是细胞、生化、分子生物、遗传、植物生理一起看，偶尔发育和神经也很勉强的接触一点，大部分还是复习高二竞赛学过的，只是分子生物学的东西和现代遗传学的很是陌生，不是一般的漏洞，简直是端壁穿孔了。还是很矛盾，像DNA拓扑结构要给出最直接的拓扑学公式才大体上明白，真是怀疑如果数学和物理就这样了将来能做什么，自从上次接到学物理的舅舅从加拿大打的电话，便有极强烈的危机感，觉得最近这样专注的东西还是没有摆脱浮躁。考完G吧，想把数学物理从高二的学起（物理大概要从初二了）。我还是在不适宜的时间作不适宜的事情啊，还比如动物和植物，真就应该像现在这样完全忽略只吃高二的老本、看课本那点东西吗？

最近还在看The McGraw-Hill Reader--Issues across the Disciplines，发现自己paraphrase的能力差太远了。其实小时候妈妈给我做智商测验，五岁时只要是跟数字沾点边的，不管是找规律、倒背还是“数数”就可以完全没障碍的搞定12岁的题目，一到了复述故事就实在弱智，七岁和十岁各做过一遍九岁能力要求的题目，还记得是复述一篇春游的作文，怎么测都不及格，要点没有，语言混乱，后半部分直接一片空白自己瞎编了，而且一直很反感听别人讲两种东西，一是早晨起来讲前晚的梦，二是讲电影、电视剧的情节。最近有了些改变，听美女师姐Kathy讲了一次她看过的在青岛拍的电影，还有看她blog概述一些事，佩服得一塌糊涂；另外，刚放暑假时重读了《八月未央》，后半部分一些写电影和书的内容，不一样的风格，可能更接近自己的思路，就是形成记忆的大部分是小细节，渐渐想要改变，尽管Any language is a conspiracy against experience in the sense that it is a collective attempt to manage experience by reducing it into discrete parcels，还是想练习把一些东西用自己的语言表达出来，表达清楚一点，于是有了这篇混乱的XX.

最后，9月份有两个我很喜欢的人过生日，一个是非要我做她的老婆的我的老婆“晕”，还有一个是“女王”，便有了两天从早到晚都在想她俩，于是又满脑子二中二中，还有那条让我在超市里哭得特惨的郭老师回的短信。借用一句大概是在宇的blog里看到的话“只要我想起你们，我就在想念你们”。尽管我还想继续躲下去。以前丁老师说我一个罐子里闷了太多的东西，担心烂掉，我开了条缝就犯了一堆错误，至今后悔，但我也不想让它们烂掉，暂且这样放着吧。

Truth and Beauty --- Aesthetics and Motivations in Science

By S. Chardrasekhar

The Scientist

So far I have considered only the sort of things a scientist seeks in the practice of his profession, and I have left to the last the consideration of his motivations. There are several schools o f thought here. I reject the view that the motivation springs from a conscious or a subconscious belif that everything he does will eventually find use in the amenities of daily life. I also reject the corollary which insists that a scientist must always consciously integrate his efforts with the social needs and urgencies of his time. But I also do not accept the view that scientists are urged on in their work by a “holy passion” for truth or a “burning curiosity” to unravel the “secrets” of nature. I do not believe that in the daily practice of his profession a scientist has much in common with the Buddha who renounced his primely life to contemplate the ethical and moral values which give meaning and significance to life. And, I am afraid, he has equally little in common with Marco Polo.

What actually does give substance and reality to the efforts of a scientists is his desire to participate actively in the process of his science to the best of his ability. And if I have to describe in one word what is the prime motive which underlies a scientist’s work, I would say systematization. That may sound rather prosaic, but I think it approaches the truth: What a scientist tries to do essentially is to select a certain domain, a certain aspect, or a certain detail, and see if that takes its appropriate place in a general scheme which has form and coherence; and, if not, to seek further information which would help him to do that. This is perhaps somewhat vagus, particularly, the use of the words “appropriate”, “general scheme”, “form”, and “coherence”. I admit that those are things which cannot be defined any more than beauty in art can be defined; but people who are acquainted with the subject have no difficulty in recognizing or appreciating it. Let me try, however, to explain what I mean by considering very briefly two examples.…

…

…the method I have adopted in my own work has always been first to learn what is already known about a subject; then to see if it conforms to those standards of rigor, logical ordering, and completion, which one has a right to ask; and, if it does not, to set about doing it.

…

The Pursuit of Science: Its Motivations

…The tranquility with which he (Kepler) applied himself to his labors and entirely ignored the warblings of flatters was to Tycho almost superhuman. There was something incomprehensible in his absence of emotion, like a breath from a distant region of ice …

…His (Kepler’s) “was a character superior in singleness”, to use Shelley’s phase.

Shakespeare, Newton and Beethoven, or Patterns of Creativity

…by the time (1807) he (Beethoven) come to writing his third Rasoumovosky quartet, his resignation to his affliction appears to be complete, for we find him writing in the margin: Let your deafness no longer be secret even for art …

…

I (Newton) am grown of all men the most shy of setting pen to paper about anything that may lead into disputes. (Sep. 12^th, 1682)

…

And finally, I cannot desist repeating Newton’s oft-quoted evaluation of himself.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing ot the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

…

Let me turn to a slightly different aspect of the matter. What are we to make of the following confession of Charles Darwin:

Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure; and even as a school boy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially historical plays … I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have almost lost my taste of pictures or music … My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.

…

It seems to me that to Darwin’s confession and to Farady’s response what Shelly has said about the cultivation of the science in his A Defense of Poetry is apposite:

The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.

…

Shelly’s A Defense of Poetry form which I have just quoted is one of the most moving documents in all of English literature. W. B. Yeats has called it “the profoundest essay on the foundation of poetry in the English language”. The essay should be read in its entirety; but allow me to read a selection:

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

…

First, my fear; then my curtsy; last my speech. My fear, is your displeasure, my curtsy, my duty, and my speech, to beg your pardon.

--- Shakespeare’s epilogue to the second part of his Henry IV

(concluding sentence of this speech)

Beauty and the Quest for Beauty in Science

In spite the inherent difficulties which beset such discussions, I shall attempt to clarify why the general theory of relativity appeals to our aesthetic sense and why we consider it as beautiful. For this purpose, it is necessary to adopt some criteria for beauty. I shall adopt two.

The first is the criterion of Francis Bacon:

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion!

(Strangeness, in this context, has the meaning “exceptional to a degree that excites wonderment and surprise”.)

The second criterion, as formulated by Heisenberg, is complementary to Bacon’s:

Beauty is the proper conformity of the parts to one another and to the whole.

…

May I conclude then by suggesting that each of us, in our own modest ways, can achieve satisfaction in our quest for beauty in science like the players in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves:

There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place tit very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what was inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation.

…