More than Infatuation

Math has always been one of my great loves. Not my only great love, of course, and certainly not that which I love the most, but it ranks pretty high on the list. The way numbers can be juggled and moved, how starting from a very simple base one can build huge impressive structures, and how Fermat didn't have quite enough room left to finish off his proof.

With this love of math, my view of the world is changed. Sometimes I see things as sets, sometimes I find myself counting (sometimes in binary), occasionally I wonder about the number of M&Ms in a jar, and find myself trying to integrate over the jar in different ways to find the best approximation. Then there're the times that I find myself proving the obvious, simply so that I know it's something that, given my axioms, I can know to be true. This also, of course, explains my love for physics.. physics is obviously just math, but less theoretical.

And as my view of the world is changed, I find that I sometimes have trouble understanding other people. I don't know how they can't see what I find to be obvious, I'm not sure where our understandings differ. Perhaps they never had that third-grade teacher that had puzzles and games instead of book exercises. Perhaps they never saw that math could help them win party and carnival games, so opted instead to focus their efforts on poetry and wine.

Perhaps they're simply not me. Perhaps we're all different, we each have our own unique gifts and character flaws. Perhaps I should have taken more psychology classes in college, but they didn't generally have enough math. And perhaps I'll consider mathematical aptitude to be my superpower. It and EMP generation, what more could a guy ask for? Well, those, and the real, true love of his life.

So with those goals accomplished, I can start spending more time wondering... how exactly /do/ you decrypt PGP without the key? And why /does/ a vase just want to keep doing whatever it is it's doing?

A Vase is Like Flowing Water

Trying to introduce children to physics, you can get some pretty odd questions. Some insightful, others..less so. But all of them are fun, and help you think on your toes.

For my favorite demo, Newton's first law, I often will tell them that the vase, just sitting there, _wants_ to keep on just sitting there. And had used pretty much the same line for a couple of years before one kid finally asks me, "How can the vase want to just sit there? It can't think, can it?"

Pause. Think.

Err, well, no, it doesn't think. But still, that's what the vase is going to do is just sit there. It has the possibility of randomly moving, similar to how things have the possibility of spontaneous combustion. Or bananas being able to quantum tunnel. But it's so unlikely, it's simply not going to happen. But how do you explain all of this to a six-year old kid? Probabilities and fun math and all sorts of stuff, when I'm not exactly sure of a really good answer, or even "why" myself. I just know, well, that's what it wants to do, don't ask me what it means for a vase to want something!

"Well, it wants to just sit there, like how water wants to flow downhill."

"Oh, okay."

Content, and apparently confident that he now understood the secrets of the universe, he took his father by the hand and moved on to watch someone else shatter a racquet ball.

And I was content that my view of the universe is capable of satisfying the curiosity of a six-year-old.

A Lesson from a Vase

For several years, I was a member of the Physics Van at UIUC, a group that goes around to area grade schools and does physics demos. Supposedly to get children interested in science, but mainly, I think, so the Van workers can have fun. Playing with liquid nitrogen and electricity and other fun physics demos, and skipping classes to do so, what more could one want?

There are a variety of fun demos, but the best one, my most favorite demo ever, is showing Newton's first law of motion, the law of inertia. The short version of this law is basically that "things keep doin' whatever they're doin'." So a set of dishes on the table is going to just sit on the table, even if the tablecloth is pulled out from beneath them (unless the tablecloth pulls on them enough to make a mess of broken dishware on the floor). So the second half of this demo is pulling the tablecloth out from under the dishes. But the _first_ half is the best part.

Take a vase, and set it on the table. Stare at it. Keep staring. Anything happen? No? Look closer. Anything happen yet? Of course not! It's a vase, it's just going to sit there. Now, imagine doing this demonstration in front of a couple hundred grade-schoolers. They're expecting something to be happening, they _know_ something interesting is going to happen, and they're waiting breathless for..anything. Yet, somehow they don't realize that the lack of anything, the fact that the vase just sits there, is pretty important itself. A vase can go through its entire existence, and not once have to lift a finger. Even if it had one to lift!

As people, we do so many things to try to improve our lives, spend so much time working, rushing around, thinking, all sorts of things that take so much effort. I'm going to take a lesson from a vase, though, and try to just keep doing whatever I'm doing. Tomorrow, I plan on spending all day in bed.