This post was written by Karl.

The title of this blog is a lie, but I am feeling somewhat ill all of a sudden tonight. I am unsure as to the cause, but I imagine the effect is amplified by my recent poor care for my own well-being, with regard to things like sleep and relaxation.

However, something cool happened to me recently. I was attending my solid state electronics lecture, and trying to listen to the professor talk. Then, the lecture ended. Last lecture he had assigned reading — this lecture, he assigned only problems. Good student that I am, I asked the professor what reading he would recommend be done for the next lecture, as I had numerous bus rides ahead of me. He told me. And I did the reading he told me of.

I am not the best coder on the planet. I do, however, feel I seem to have a lot of ‘instinct’ for various algorithmic situations that many people with my education seem to lack. I blame it on the early age at which I began coding. This age was around six years. I coded mostly in AppleBASIC on my father’s Apple IIe. The first command I learned was “plot”, torn from my father by the whining of a child, to draw a single pixel of a given colour on the screen. I had great fun.

I often think of this and how others are trained to code. They do silly things like “Hello, world” or “Input 3 numbers. Here is the sum. Here is the average. Here is how I feel about life as a computer.” There is an advantage to this text-based regimen — the students (who don’t fall off the ladder) learn to code much, much faster than I did. But the problem is that it is boring. For years all of my programs were graphics and games — exciting, fun things. Perhaps it was just because I was young, I know not.

But yeah, graphics. I like graphics. They’re fun. I learned to write ray tracers(which is, incidentally, still so much fun — graphics hardware is now far beyond what’s needed for very significant realtime raytracing; should totally make a flash game using it in preparation for flash player 11 when hardware fragment shaders will be implemented) and polygon renderers by reading books and experimenting. I was always trying to think of different ways to simulate visual reality, different from what I’d read about — I had a few different gimics I always wanted to try out.

Unfortunately, it took me a long time to learn about memory limitations; you can’t really make a photorealistic procedurally generated universe based upon layers and layers of impostors because computers have a finite amount of storage. And because I did not understand this, I always wanted to pursue the idea I just linked (guy totally stole it from me) — but taken to the extreme. I figured as long as the output was being cached in memory, it could be entirely simulated. I wanted to simulate the universe on an atomic scale, and use this to generate photorealistic worlds.

This got me interested in everything. How plants grow, what cells are made of, how water flows — I kept wanting to learn more. But at the very smallest scale, nobody has ever been able to help me. Why do atoms form these Pi bonds? Why do water molecules have this radius? Why do some materials scatter light, and some reflect light with equal angles of incidence and reflection? Often things would come down to mysterious hand-waving and a mention of the god-like Schrodinger Equation.

The Schrodinger Equation. The answer to everything. And just like his cat, nobody seemed able to tell what the Schrodinger Equation actually was.

Soon my energy waned with regard to learning what interested me. I resigned myself to the old ladder of schoolteachers telling you outdated, false things, making things up when you asked for more, and then later teachers telling more outdated, false things that were a little more accurate than what earlier teachers said.

But then things changed. I took my Solid State Electronics textbook with me. And I read it. And it told me: The Schrodinger Equation. I was walked through its derivation. I saw it solved for electron density volumes. The culmination of all my hopes and dreams.

If only I understood what I was reading.