Last weekend, Xiong Ji and I went to see "Doctor Strange". At the end of the film, when the doctor soared from the streets of Hong Kong Island to the dark dimension and started a decisive battle with the big boss, he finally asked sleepily, why are there neuron in the dark dimension?
Probably because the PhD is a neuroscientist?
Oh, I was deceived by you. I thought it was a true neuroscientist, but it turned out to be a god-stick cult. The true neuroscientist working in Greenwich Village is indignant, and his hair is messed up. It has no resemblance to the high-spirited doctor who has a luxury car name in the movie.
This is a bit of a stick...I murmured, let's go watch "Arrival" together? The adaptation of Ted Jiang’s novel, the one I have shown you...
Don’t go or go, I’m going back to write a paper!
So I had to go by myself. The original novel "The Story of Your Life" is one of my favorite science fiction short stories. After the golden age of Asimov and Arthur Clarke passed away, Ted Jiang’s works explored some profound and beautiful issues that have nothing to do with the human self in a delicate and delicate structure.
However, I was disappointed again, but I was helpless. The director took great efforts to render the sense of heterogeneity with alien life for the first time, and the passage of family affection is also moving. In the face of extraterrestrial forces, the paragraphs where countries competed vaguely have the shadow of the Iron Curtain theory, but the most touching content of the novel itself has been silently discarded in the tailoring.
Is this a movie about linguistics and the human mind? Most people might think so. After all, the audience met the alien life with the female professor of linguistics as the protagonist. In the movie, the heroine discovered that the language features of aliens became the key to solving all puzzles.
But this is not the case in the novel. That vase-like physicist pointed out the Fermat principle in geometric optics and the expanded variational principle common to all branches of physics, which are the cornerstones of the whole work. The language of aliens is just a simple application of the principle of variation. It can be derived from the principle of variation that the necessity of linear time arrows in the laws of physics, after literary packaging, constitutes the narrative style of the whole work.
In the movie, the physicist is the same as physics, but a small embellishment on an easy-to-understand film and television feast. The core reality theory is not even mentioned. The audience just marvels at the imaginary spectacle, but ignores that what the novel describes is a certain real picture of our world.
Since Copernicus overthrew the theory of the center of the earth, it took five hundred years before the concept of absolute space was gradually broken in the hearts of ordinary people. Since Einstein put forward the theory of relativity, we don't know how long it will take for the unchanging river of time to be reconsidered in everyone's heart.
"The Story of Your Life" is asking this question. Her beauty is also here. In my opinion, the spectacles imagined out of thin air, the love and hatred in the cloak of science fiction, are not the ultimate goal of a good science fiction novel. The greatest sense of surprise will always come from the incomprehensible but incomparably real side of this world.
Although, the road leading to that side is covered with thorns.
When I got home and complained to Xiong Ji, he took out the "Introduction to Algebra" from his undergraduate period. It’s much better to learn this than to watch those movies.
Hmph, I also learned "Concise Linear Algebra"! Not to be outdone, I took out a thin book.
You are all tricks and tricks. Need to understand the nature of the world. Xiong Ji dismissed it. People who have never studied abstract algebra are actually like little monkeys, that is, they can drive cars or something...
Cut, you say, 99.99...% of the people in this world are monkeys La! I was so angry that I could not defend myself, but vaguely knew in my heart that what he said was true.
The year I studied "Concise Linear Algebra", I was a freshman. One day, the lecture noticed that the teacher who compiled the textbook in the evening would talk about Li Algebra for two hours, and students who were interested could go and listen to it.
At that time, we just learned matrix calculations, and the famous love song prince came to the school for a concert in the same night. It was very tangled for a while. Finally, we went to the dim old classroom.
That was probably the most memorable class at the undergraduate level.
The Qingzhu grandpa picked up a piece of chalk and wrote a simple definition on the blackboard, which even the kindergarten children could understand.
However, in the next two hours, the deduction and transformation are like branches and leaves growing densely. Each step is simple and beautiful, and each step is extremely natural. It even makes people feel that these branches and leaves originally grew there. What it does is just uncover the tulle covering it.
Two hours later, I looked at the final result on the blackboard and couldn't speak. Starting from the simplest definition, what is constructed is a complex and abstract, but incomparably sophisticated algebraic structure and theory, which can be applied to the most cutting-edge modern mathematical fields.
That was the first time I deeply experienced the power of the human mind, and it was also the first time I felt the breathtaking beauty of the world.
Just like the little girl in the movie has the father of a physicist, the mother of a linguist, and people are also children born from the combination of these two sides of the world.
However, the father and mother parted ways at some point. In today's mass media, the image of the father is blurred, distorted, and silent. A small group of children raised by their father walked alone, and more children followed their mothers, observing the changes in the world and the entanglement in their hearts. They no longer cared about the meaning of their fathers, and no longer understood what came from that side. A language that describes the world.
If the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis holds, then, at the end of all roads, we are not sure whether everything will meet eventually.
And we have embarked on this speechless road.
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