Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Math Class

I've started taking a math class and it's fun. Yeah I know that's nerdy but what can I say? I can't hide from it. Heck, I have two degrees from a notoriously technical university and work as an engineer in the aerospace industry. To be yourself is all that you can do.
So I was thinking, math is spooky. It is spooky how universal it is. It describes literally everything. The movements of stars, the behavior of light, the development of life, and the production of hurricanes. The whole shebang. I mean think about it, if you write a computer simulation about something in reality and it models it perfectly, what is the difference? It's like that story of the tribesman who got scared when you took their picture because they thought you were stealing their soul. Well seeing the math behind something is like that, it's like stealing its soul.
I started reading Penrose's epic physics tome "The Road to Reality". The first part is a little metaphysical but he basically divides reality into 3 parts; the mind, the physical world, and the abstract mathematical world. They are all connected in a very strange and nested way. It's like the self eating snakes Plato talked about called the Ouroboros. Plato used it as a symbol for something that kept re-creating itself in such a way that it was eternal. It does actually seem that way. The mind is a subset or part of the physical world. And the mathematical world is a part of the mind. But then the physical world seems to be a manifestation of the mathematical world.
What does that mean? Who knows. Maybe they are all connected in a deeper way we can't really see. Maybe they are all the same thing.

2 comments:

Jen said...

What kind of math are you taking? Where? I feel like I need to brush up - real math is starting to intimidate me.

JP said...

It's a crazy whirlwind grad math course called Math Methods for Physics at UHCL. First lecture was JUST on differential equations... ( i mean that itself is it's own course!) Next lecture was infinite series and tonight's is on integrals. It goes on through linear algebra and Fourier series.
It's basically all the math we learned for engineering all at once.
It's crazy seeing this stuff again! But it's fun and good for problem solving skills. Didn't Lincoln read Euclid's The Elements for logic training?