I’ve been writing a program to simulate soap films over the last week. Soap films. You know—the stuff bubbles are made of. Those rainbow things.
I wonder why I’m doing this.
One part is simple: I love programming. I love the tetris-like tedium of refactoring and optimizing. I love parallelizing tasks, manipulating arrays. When I write code I am a fish born to swim through endless streams of data.
There’s a practical aspect, as well. Over the last year of freedom and adventure, I’ve kept intellectual work at a distance, choosing instead to engage with the “real world.” Now, more self-aware, I understand that thinking is my real world. This project is a way for me to gently ease back into routine.
That said—the central reason that I’m working on this project is something else entirely. I can’t stop thinking about soap. I see those iridescent bands and for a moment I am the light, endlessly refracted. I am the water, convected, diffused. There is a certain weight in my hands as I work the differential operators; a sense that the scrawled symbols are sacred beyond measure. Then the computer summons pure magic and I know that my place at this desk is nothing other than destiny.
The causal pathways of balding and now soap, I love how your interests are so very particular and tuned just to your desires.
What are you aiming to model exactly? Are how modeling how the light interacts with soap? Or simply the way liquid-like coloured substances interact?
adore