y u lukin lidat

May 2012... 13 years ago to the day. I did a 600+ km  overnight motorbike ride across the country as I was on vacation and had just got a job offer confirmed - they expected me to start on May 28th. left Karnataka at like 6pm and reached home at about 10am. there was no network for the first 6 hours or so, and Google didn't have offline maps back then - I was riding in the dark along (and sometimes beside!) country roads in the hope of getting to a highway... which I did at almost midnight. I remember the sigh of relief when I pulled into the Kolhapur McDonald's, finally able to freshen up and grab a bite. 

From stert to finish, I listened to this song on loop and sang along - literally the entire night, to keep myself alert:

Inna - Amazing

When I got bored of the existing lyrics, I made up my own. Mostly funny and sometimes rude, some so rude I can never repeat them out loud. Not that it really matters what I sang though. It kept me going.

Y U Lukin Lidat!

the universe is finite

My YouTube viewing list (and also my subscriptions, now that I've actually started subscribing to stuff) is predominantly science-y content (with the odd aviation, coffee and motoring stuff that creeps in). Last week was particularly physics-y though. So much so that I had an astrophysics dream! The dream was of the universe being a cube (strange, because everything we know points to it being spherical or spheroidal), but the stranger bit was what was happening inside the cube:

The cube was initially entirety and uniformly lit bright, and then suddenly seemed to undergo an implosion of sorts, after which it went from bring brightly and uniformly lit, into being filled with rapidly shrinking specs of light. It remained a cube throughout, but the contents of the cube were changing. 

When I woke up and had a thought about it, I realized it was a different way of looking at the universe. A finite universe.

And that's when it struck me: the total mass and energy of the universe has been and will be constant. The universe seems to be expanding very quickly, but that expansion is a function of time. If one was to use time as a scaling factor of the universe, it doesn't seem infinite at all.

The universe was never born, and will never die. It's just constantly being scaled by time. In fact, could it be that the only scaling happens in our perception?

I need to ask a physicist. 

a new day has come

Saturday. 1:30am. I know I'm supposed to go to bed, and nobody would fault me for doing so, but I have unfinished business. a feature I wrote 3 weeks ago, which I was unable to get around to testing until Monday... when it bombed spectacularly (I exaggerate - it bombed, but could be switched off in 30 seconds so we could get on with other things that were being tested). It's been playing on my head all week. I took a stab at fixing it on Thursday, to no avail. Something was wrong and no amount of logging helped me locate the problem. I wrote a test case so I could single-step locally (did it seriously take me so long to start writing a test? embarrassing!) The test case only confirmed the problem was not obvious. Single stepping while rewriting my code to get the test to pass the most basic scenario still didn't help! I had logged off at 6:30pm on Friday hoping a walk would clear my mind and give me a fresh approach - but 2 hours of walking by the sea didn't. But I didn't want to give up. I didn't want to start my Monday morning still clueless about what was wrong. And so, after everyone was in bed, I was back at my computer. 

Saturday. 3am. The YouTube video playing in the background gives me goosebumps for the third or maybe the fourth time. I switch to my browser and start typing a comment to let the world know how this video touched me, despite it being about the physics of black holes. Something about it elevating me beyond my mundane existence. I pause the video because I can't type while paying attention to the video. I post the comment but leave the video paused. It's been emotional enough. It's obvious the video isn't helping me solve the problem with my code, but that doesn't seem to matter. Nothing seems to matter. I'm on autopilot.

Saturday. 3:45am. The problem has been found. The most trivial of scenarios work. Time to clean up all my junk troubleshooting code, delete unnecessary logging and finish the test case. No more single stepping. The sky outside isn't pitch dark any more. 

Saturday. 4:45am. I am happy with my code. Everything is committed and pushed. Merge requests raised. I switch off the light as it's now a bright dawn.

Saturday, 5am. It's a beautiful morning. I gaze out of the window. It's the same sight I've seen hundreds of times before - but it somehow looks better at this hour. I think to myself that I might be the only person admiring this view at this moment. 

Mom's alarm goes off. It's supposed to remind her to go pee. It doesn't wake her up - it never does. 

The alarm is a soothing morning-y tune. 

I have goosebumps again. 

I'm not tired. I'm a little emotional. In this moment, everything feels right. It doesn't matter if I've spent the day and the night doing something that could have been solved in about 15 minutes (without the test case though! good tests always take time 😁). The process has left me fulfilled. I have stayed up all night doing something I love. I have finished it to my satisfaction. It's been a while since I did this. I feel connected to my past. I feel exactly like I did as a teenager. I am happy that of all the things that have changed, this feeling hasn't. 

I look out from another window. A seagull is perched on a floodlight. It reminds me of the morning in 2012 when, after a whole night up and at my computer, I stepped out with my camera at dawn and spent half an hour clicking random photos of birds and flowers before finally going to bed. 

It's time to go to bed, not because I'm sleepy, but because I want to savour this feeling and not dilute it with any other.

Good night! 

ps: title inspired by the Celine Dion song - or rather, its music video. another throwback to times long past!