Tuesday 18 January 2011

Maths.......Huh! What is is good for? Absolutely nuttin'......Say it again.....

'But you'll never need this in REAL life' I used to wail at my maths teachers.

And then I go and watch BBC's Horizon - 'What Is Reality?'

Now my head is throbbing with wild notions of parallel universes, lots of me's out there doing different things, perhaps even being successful - (it's my fantasy, I can type what I like here........) Real things like a single proton of light being in 2 places at the same time, but only when you don't look at it. (Like me at ballet class show the parent day, I was fab, until looked at. 'You look like a wet dish cloth' the scraped-headed one bellowed and that's one reality I hope was not bounced about the universe.) It's Red Dwarf stuff. But Kryton or Holly always managed to explain it perfectly well. Clever professors can't, even using pumpkins or tennis balls. One silver-bearded dome-head was describing his widely accepted theory that we are all just a hologram projected from the edge of a black hole and when the interviewer stuttered that she thought she understood he got very cross 'No you don't! You don't understand it! None of us do!' I think all of the clever bods agreed that we don't have the human language to understand 'reality'. It was the chap up a lighthouse scribbling his hieroglyphic mathematical equations all over the windows that made me really 'ping' (in the lightbulb sense - so apt for the location). He was glowing with love for his equations - 'this one tells us all about ..... (god knows), and this one tells us all about..... (blah blah)......' For him, the only language to attempt to understand reality is the language of mathematics.

It all seemed rather beautiful.



But you can't ever use this in real life.

Can you?





Damn you BBC......

I shall go to bed now and work it all out and let you all know the answer tomorrow.

I shall let you know if the moon still exists when noone's looking at it. Einstein couldn't prove it did. Just give me a couple of hours.

2 comments:

  1. I always find Horizon is half an hour too long. Just when I think I'm getting it, they witter on a bit more and lose me completely.

    Are you awake yet? Did you work it all out?

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