Well, it's been a few months since my last post. In that time, I ... haven't done all that much, really. Got a job, met a few people. Not exactly the eventful time I had in the USA, where I was, conversely, not getting a job and meeting a lot of new people. Weird, isn't it.
Even after living most of my life outside India, the Indian culture's predisposition towards female inequality is not altogether shocking, deplorable though it may be. Although the issue is far from vanquished in the so-called "first world" ... it's just a tad subtler there. It's had me thinking a lot about ignorance and the perception of morality, and given my abstract familiarity with some concepts of physics I'm not entirely sure why the following musings didn't occur to me sooner. Somehow it seems fairly self-evident - but then, who thinks about these things, anyway?
The very basic postulate behind the general theory of relativity is evident from its name: everything is relative. With the possible exception of the speed of light, there is no point or motion in space or in time that we can single out as being an absolute reference point for everything around it. There is nowhere and nothing that we can point to and imagine, "That is the center of everything. All observations made with respect to this reference are flawless, and any and all other observations are fundamentally incomplete."
As it develops, the theory goes on to describe the general interaction of mass with space and time: like weights on a sheet of rubber, each piece of matter in the Universe deforms space and time around it, with more massive objects causing the trajectory of smaller ones to gravitate towards them as a result, and causing a localized slowing of the passage of time. This trajectory change is what we perceive as the 'pulling' effect of gravity, while the slowing of time is nigh imperceptible (unless, of course, you choose to rely on GPS - if one didn't account for the time slowing, your marked position on the globe would be off by up to 10 km every day!).
In the same way that physical objects deform the continuum of space and time, so too do big decisions deform the continuum of one's social group. Does this make sense? Probably not, but it does account for a fair bit of my experience, I think. That's about all I could come up with for now; figure this one out for yourselves.
As it develops, the theory goes on to describe the general interaction of mass with space and time: like weights on a sheet of rubber, each piece of matter in the Universe deforms space and time around it, with more massive objects causing the trajectory of smaller ones to gravitate towards them as a result, and causing a localized slowing of the passage of time. This trajectory change is what we perceive as the 'pulling' effect of gravity, while the slowing of time is nigh imperceptible (unless, of course, you choose to rely on GPS - if one didn't account for the time slowing, your marked position on the globe would be off by up to 10 km every day!).
In the same way that physical objects deform the continuum of space and time, so too do big decisions deform the continuum of one's social group. Does this make sense? Probably not, but it does account for a fair bit of my experience, I think. That's about all I could come up with for now; figure this one out for yourselves.
