/sci/ - Science & Math

I took Adderall the other day and ended up working on my conjecture for 8 hours straight. By 4:30am, my conjecture had been proven. This was after a few weeks of minimal progress.

Pros: My clarity, focus and retention were sharply improved.

Cons: My creativity was drastically decreased (crucial in mathematics). Also, off the drug, my mind was scattered and my focus was way worse.

I can't really decide whether or not I condone amphetamine use for math. On one hand, I was able to do math like a fucking mad man. On the other hand, my physical, mental and social health all took an acute hit that would really compound into an undesirable situation after a few weeks of using it.

As a compromise, I am contemplating periodic use of the drug. Something like once a week or once every two weeks. I was actually prescribed Adderall in the first grade and used it daily during the school year all the way until my freshman year of college. I suspect long term use has contributed to adverse characteristics of myself. Characteristics such as stunted growth, mild depression, memory loss, poor focus, low libido and premature aging. Of course, these could all be attributed to other factors but amphetamine use seems most likely to me.

fucking kike doctors giving little kids speed as if it will be just fine during some of a humans most formative years. my paranoia has me anticipating brain cancer from the shit or a heart attack at the least.

One of the greatest quests of humankind is to understand the universe, this place we find ourselves in. How it works, how things and phenomena we observe and measure are a consequence of other things. It is often said that science only aims at explaining the how, not the why, but then it is often forgotten that wondering and asking about the why can help explain the how. Note that I don't mean 'why' as in purpose but as in physical cause.

Unfortunately it seems that nowadays people are no longer working towards this quest. Fundamental theories in physics start from axioms, the logical consequences of which help describe what we observe and allow to predict measurements and observations, but people no longer wonder about or try to find physical mechanisms that could explain why these axioms are true. They have stopped their questioning and their reasoning at these axioms, which we are supposed to accept and be content with. I'll exemplify what I mean with the case of special relativity.

One of the axioms of special relativity is that the two-way speed of light is always measured to be the same by any observer in an inertial frame. Einstein does not wonder what physical mechanism could cause any observer to measure the two-way speed of light to be constant, he takes it as a law of nature, and deduce from it the effects of length contraction and time dilation. But what kind of law of nature is this that depends on observers, what if we want to know why all inertial observers measure the two-way speed of light to be the same, what is the physical explanation behind it?

In fact the constancy of the measured two-way speed of light can be deduced from the idea that light propagates at velocity c relative to a physical medium, and that observers moving at velocity v relative to this medium are length contracted and time dilated by the factor sqrt(1-v^2/c^2).