What kind of enlightenment does daily life offer us?

LEE WOO-YOUNG
The author is HCMC Distinguished professor at the Korea Advanced Research Institute.

It is not just too much information that awakens us from darkness. Sometimes a coincidental moment in our daily lives suddenly affects us. Archimedes discovered the principle of buoyancy from a spark of ordinary life while watching water flowing from a bathtub. Descartes saw a fly crawling on the ceiling and discovered the coordinate system. Therefore, we can wake up with only one thing.

German mathematician Johann Dirichlet (1805-1859) had been working on a number theory problem for years. One day he had a chance to visit Rome and went to see the Sistine Chapel. While listening to a hymn, the “pigeonhouse principle” suddenly came to his mind: “If n items are placed in m containers with n 〉 m, then at least one container must contain more than one item” – suddenly came to his mind. The principle opened the secret door and the problem was solved. A piece of music woke him up.

Meanwhile, Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) spent years on the problem of expanding the number system. One day he went for a walk with his wife along the Royal Canal near Dublin and was crossing the Broom Bridge. As he stared at the sunset, a spark occurred to him that he might give up something to solve the problem. “Let’s abandon the law of variation for multiplication.” Then the darkness cleared. Finally, the quaternion number system, which expands complex numbers, emerged in the world. The sight woke him up.

A few years ago, I was frustrated because I was obsessing over an unsolved problem for too long. A friend sent me a book. It wasn’t something that interested me much at first. I was mindlessly flipping through the pages and suddenly noticed a sentence. “Dispersion is a series of disguises.” He woke me up and after a while the problem was solved. One sentence inspired my imagination.

A line of text, a scene or a landscape can awaken and renew our lives. That’s why we read books, go on trips, watch movies and listen to music in our spare time.