It seems that whatever it is that leads to great discoveries tends to often also lead to very sad, tragic lives. Perhaps, after all, our minds are set up to only deal with certainties, since that is a reasonable approximation of the world around us until you look further. I mean, for most of our evolutionary time, whether logic was omnipotent or not didn't really matter, and arguably for most people still doesn't. Again, there are things our mind really doesn't like dealing with, the nature of itself included.
The Boltzmann part reminded me of how fucking annoying it was is to have your laws and certainties chipped away at the deeper you go in your science education. Especially in chemistry, for me anyway. I learned that certain atoms combined together yield certain products. I learned some of those reactions, and they made perfect sense. And then those bastards dared to tell me that the reactions were actually equilibria, with the tendency to proceed to either side affected by a plethora of other conditions and factors. Ie, yes at 100 degrees water boils, but some of it also condenses. It's just that more particles escape the liquid form than come back in, and the higher the temperature (pressure comes into play as well), the more those particles tend to escape to the gas form and not come back. Tend. Everything in science tends to be a tendency.
And then you learn that electrons around an atom exist as a probability function, that is you can never pinpoint an electron at an exact place or exact time. And this probability distribution is INFINITE -- that is, an electron can literally be anywhere! But with a 95% chance of being inside what is termed an 'orbital'. That 95% is completely arbitrary, and drawn because it's just obligatory for us to work with something not so infinite, even if it really is. So where is the edge of things, really, if electron clouds are merely arbitrarily-cut-off portions of infinite probability distributions? What is matter?
Oh, error analysis was also annoying -- what do you mean, I can't actually measure anything precisely? My instrument shows blah, and blah it is! What's with this +/- error shit? Grrrr. (and now once you grasp the concept of error, it seems almost absurd that anyone could think their measurements are free of error!)
So now the water's edge no longer exists (for particles are always oscillating between liquid and gas forms at the boundary), the physical edge no longer exists, location can never be pinpointed. A giant pain in the ass, y'know. And then there's the little detail that you can never 'prove' anything in science. Man I have a pet peeve around people throwing around "My data proves..." in the scientific circles (usually beginning grad students or undergrads, but sometimes people who should know better too!) As you sink deeper and deeper into the huge pile of mess that is science, statistics becomes your only hope, like a crutch of some sort. Stats is all lies and BS, but it's mathematically disciplined lies. That's a little better, no?
Thus science education is basically a series of disappointments! And I probably have a loooong ways left to go. Thing is, with these kinds of personal intellectual 'revolutions' (mind you, leeching off the hard work and harsh lives of the geniuses who have uncovered them first), you don't realise anything's wrong until someone tells you. At which point you resist, much like the contemporaries of Cantor et al. Of course, you have the advantage of knowing those 'revolutions' are most likely true, whereas those contemporaries didn't. But after struggling with it for a while (I suspect most of the progress actually happens subconsciously as the idea ferments in your mind), it suddenly becomes so bloody obvious that you can barely remember believing otherwise in the first place! (probably a significant factor in the problems of science communication and education...)
Anyway, I'm gonna stop rambling. But that was good, thanks!
Love watching psychological thrillers as well; horror on a physical level is fake and boring, but horror on a psychological level is quite interesting to watch! Gets you more emotionally involved with the plot, which to me is a major part of reading/watching a story.
