October 14, 2012

• A Relative Accident

  One of the best compliments I ever received came from a teacher who told me that of all the math students he’d had, I more easily comprehend complex concepts than anyone else. Strange concepts are naturally easy for my brain to swallow. I don’t know what other people spend their time thinking about, but my brain tends to stray towards the abstract.

  I often have ideas where I understand the math that would be needed to support an idea and how that math would work but lack the finesse to bring forth that math. For example, in 2004 while I traveled by train through Spain I picked up a small notebook at a depot and over the afternoon proceeded to write a set of rules. When applied, the rules are how one would teach an autonomous computer system to visually identify objects. And from there I wrote a different set of rules on how to give such systems a form of intuition.

  And on occasion I’ve had theories which I later discovered other people had thought of first. Such a moment is a bit depressing, but it is also very inspiring to have a moment where you know that you independently arrived at the same conclusion as someone else, even if the other person arrived their first. For example, in high school I developed an idea that I later encountered in my psychology classes known as “Matching Theory”.

  About 12 years ago I picked up a sketch book and in the back I created three columns. The first column is about a girl. The second column is about the expansion of the universe and time dilation (or rather, expansion of the universe without the existence of time). The third column, related to the second , is about positioning in space. I never put weight behind the 2nd or the 3rd columns because they seemed novel and I don’t have any math to go with them.

  Then last week, while listening to an episode of Radiolab titled “Space”, Neil deGrasse Tyson (a brilliant physicist) explained that Einstein’s general theory of relativity states that: “if you live in an expanding universe, in this fabric of space and time, no matter where you are, it will look like the center”.

  Which is very strange to me, because that is what column 3 says too.

  • 6:12 pm
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