Friday, July 29, 2011
Weird waking dream...
I woke up this morning after a weird dream, which was sort of funny.
Basically I was in some college style mathematics class, and judging on the surroundings it was a 10AM class.
What it appeared to be was a calculus class (I should know, I did get to that level in high school) but given the topic of the light discussion - I have reason to suspect it was a calculus class for physics majors. This is because instead of treating the variables just as some purely mathematical constructs, there was some air of understanding the deeper implications of what they represented. (Even high school calculus classes have equations for linear attenuation and things of that nature in their books, but there is no talk at all of what those variables represent. It's pretty funny actually.)
The funny thing that made it memorable was that none other than Ben Stein was teaching it. (Bueller? Bueller?) Yeah, that guy. But he actually wasn't boring in this case. In real life he's also an economics major, so it's not at all like he wouldn't be qualified to teach this subject. Math is math in that regard.
The sad part of the dream is that I felt like the slowest person in a class full of nerds. (And that's defining nerds in a good way.) So I came to class the least prepared. All I had was a piece of paper and one pencil. But nobody cared. Apparently because it was the first day and everybody else was too polite to say anything. (Either that or that I was there for some reason.) The bad thing was is that in the dream I was dead-tired. Ben Stein was talking about some project by a classmate at Harvard (did he go there?) and if anybody knew what it was about. Surprisingly the other students were pretty blank on this, and I was the one that knew what it was about. It had to do with Bussard-Heim fusion of methane molecules, in other words there was some process that fused the hydrogen in methane without too much worry about the carbon atoms. And then we started with some long equation about "Shumann Resonance" or something like that. It started out with R (but written in a particular way) equals E equals... (yes, the same E of E=mc^2) then a long equation involving square roots and such. And that's where I started falling asleep. And I was sort of pissed at myself for doing so in the dream. I was trying hard as hell to write that down. But I was the kind of tired where everything goes blurry. So I tilted back to keep from laying my head on the desk. But then started leaning way back and passed out.
And that's when I woke up.
Why the hell did I dream about that? It's just the weirdest stupidest thing, and in being awake it doesn't make that much sense. And I'm going to have look up the subject of discussion to see if it resembles what was being written on the chalkboard.
Basically I was in some college style mathematics class, and judging on the surroundings it was a 10AM class.
What it appeared to be was a calculus class (I should know, I did get to that level in high school) but given the topic of the light discussion - I have reason to suspect it was a calculus class for physics majors. This is because instead of treating the variables just as some purely mathematical constructs, there was some air of understanding the deeper implications of what they represented. (Even high school calculus classes have equations for linear attenuation and things of that nature in their books, but there is no talk at all of what those variables represent. It's pretty funny actually.)
The funny thing that made it memorable was that none other than Ben Stein was teaching it. (Bueller? Bueller?) Yeah, that guy. But he actually wasn't boring in this case. In real life he's also an economics major, so it's not at all like he wouldn't be qualified to teach this subject. Math is math in that regard.
The sad part of the dream is that I felt like the slowest person in a class full of nerds. (And that's defining nerds in a good way.) So I came to class the least prepared. All I had was a piece of paper and one pencil. But nobody cared. Apparently because it was the first day and everybody else was too polite to say anything. (Either that or that I was there for some reason.) The bad thing was is that in the dream I was dead-tired. Ben Stein was talking about some project by a classmate at Harvard (did he go there?) and if anybody knew what it was about. Surprisingly the other students were pretty blank on this, and I was the one that knew what it was about. It had to do with Bussard-Heim fusion of methane molecules, in other words there was some process that fused the hydrogen in methane without too much worry about the carbon atoms. And then we started with some long equation about "Shumann Resonance" or something like that. It started out with R (but written in a particular way) equals E equals... (yes, the same E of E=mc^2) then a long equation involving square roots and such. And that's where I started falling asleep. And I was sort of pissed at myself for doing so in the dream. I was trying hard as hell to write that down. But I was the kind of tired where everything goes blurry. So I tilted back to keep from laying my head on the desk. But then started leaning way back and passed out.
And that's when I woke up.
Why the hell did I dream about that? It's just the weirdest stupidest thing, and in being awake it doesn't make that much sense. And I'm going to have look up the subject of discussion to see if it resembles what was being written on the chalkboard.
Labels: calculus, class, dream, math, physics, weird
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Another random thought - on a mostly unread blog.
After reading some random stuff, this is how I think relations between anything in space could be described:
(X, Y, Z), t , (Xi, Yi, Zi), ti
Thus there are the normally observable portions of space X, Y, Z, definable at time t. But then there are the "imaginary" space components Xi, Yi, Zi and the ti for an imaginary time. The "i" component of these elements is more or less the same "i" seen in math using complex numbers. If you were to square their value, you'd see a negative real number.
I almost suspect that gravity would be the resultant of an imaginary square, since it is only observable as an attractive force. There might not be any "anti-gravity", but perhaps knowing how the relation of an imaginary space component ties into a standard one might allow you to zero out gravity or produce a strong attractor. (Still the net effect of a combined zeroing the influence of a natural attractor and production of an artificial accelerating force might look like antigravity in a practical sense.) Also this might be interesting for quantum particles that blink in and out of real space - squares of imaginary stuff would blink into negative components of real space. (Not necessarily antimatter, but it might be left handed where normally such things are right handed, etc.) Gets a little too funky for me to think of in detail, but that scratches the surface at least.
(X, Y, Z), t , (Xi, Yi, Zi), ti
Thus there are the normally observable portions of space X, Y, Z, definable at time t. But then there are the "imaginary" space components Xi, Yi, Zi and the ti for an imaginary time. The "i" component of these elements is more or less the same "i" seen in math using complex numbers. If you were to square their value, you'd see a negative real number.
I almost suspect that gravity would be the resultant of an imaginary square, since it is only observable as an attractive force. There might not be any "anti-gravity", but perhaps knowing how the relation of an imaginary space component ties into a standard one might allow you to zero out gravity or produce a strong attractor. (Still the net effect of a combined zeroing the influence of a natural attractor and production of an artificial accelerating force might look like antigravity in a practical sense.) Also this might be interesting for quantum particles that blink in and out of real space - squares of imaginary stuff would blink into negative components of real space. (Not necessarily antimatter, but it might be left handed where normally such things are right handed, etc.) Gets a little too funky for me to think of in detail, but that scratches the surface at least.
Labels: boredom, math, physics, rambling, randomness
