Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Math Dork Stuff

Here is a really cool video that dwells into a little bit of "string theory". For those of you who are not very math or physics oriented, string theory is the idea that there are 10 dimensions and at the uppermost dimension lies a series of "Strings" that vibrate in a sense to make everything and nothing and all creation...lol...Its easy to imagine 2 dimensions (ie paper, flat surfaces, xy Cartesian coordinates) and 3 dimensional (the world that we live in, adding z to the axis and imagining things in 3d space) and even 4 dimensions (taking every instance of 3d space as its own identity and thus creating the illusion of the 4th dimension) time. But what comes after that...what does it exactly mean to be FIVE dimensional....or SIX dimensional. Rob Bryanton tries to explain this to everyone in his book.

"Imagining the Tenth Dimension" is a book that is being marketed pretty heavily that tries to break down mathematics of 10 dimensional space to people like you, who may not have much (if any) mathematical background. If you have about 10 minutes take a look at these video...they are by far some of the most interesting stuff I have seen in a while. I intend on buying and reading this book very soon (I just started Wolves of Calla, so it may take a few weeks for me to order it).

Imagining the Tenth Dimension part 1 of 2




Imagining the Tenth Dimension part 2 of 2




If you found this interesting, which I did, you may find his blog (which is a tad more technical in spots) to be interesting as well. Hes a bit quirky, but also a bit funny.

2 comments:

Daniel said...

Didn't they find a fatal flaw with string theory recently? That was always the problem. It was either all or NOTHING. There was no in between about it being right. Either way, the way I heard it explained was this:

Imagine you look at a power line from a long way away. You see two dimensions (height, width)

Now move closer. You see that the power line is indeed round and there is a third dimension (depth).

Now extrapolate that to dimensions that we don't really understand. You get closer, you get another dimension all the way up to 10.

The reason it is 10 is that it takes 10 before the math starts to work.

If you like this kind of stuff, you need to read Michio Kaku's book, Hyperspace. It hurts to think about but it's really cool stuff.

Corey said...

Sweet. I will check the book out