From: Brichero, Robert, HMR/GB (ROBERT.BRICHERO@hmrag.com)
Date: Wed Jan 14 1998 - 09:48:00 MST
Kennita Watson wrote:
>Anders Sandberg wrote:
[snip]
>It took me a little while to decipher this, so for our studio audience,
>the answer to danny's original question is "no", because you need no
>coordinates at all to determine the position of a point in a point, so
>if you're counting coordinates or writing equations, the 0-dimension
>never shows up.
>
>Sigh, that doesn't sound clear enough either. I probably got an
intuitive
>grasp of it from reading "Flatland", but not enough to explain it to
>laymen. Oh well.
I find this very interesting - I understood perfectly what both Anders
and Kennita were saying, as I'm sure many others did - but why is this
so difficult to explain? As Kennita puts it, we seem to have an
"intuitive grasp" of the idea. If this is so, what was it that first
gave us this? The same can be said of many other subjects which may be
considered extropian such as quantum theory (e.g. wave particle
duality). What is it about such subjects that causes them to require
understanding on an intuitive level? Is it their complexity, or just
their bizarreness?
I'm sure physics teachers (and people trying to explain other extropian
ideas) would love to know! @:-)
Robert Bricheno
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:48:27 MST