You can't turn a bunch of little squares into a big triangle
with a smooth diagonal line, no matter how small you make the
squares or how big you make the triangle.
It's no surprise that we find fancy, twisty triangles in the
middle of matter (quarks and other things that appear in twisty
3s): And triangles are confusing to the human brain. We
interpret them badly - many optical illusions are simply based
on confusing our minds with triangles (perspective is a
triangle)
A circle is just an infinity of reversing triangles all stuck
together and when we try to put it into our ''very square''
decimal system, we can things like Pi, which keeps going and
going and going.
Fractions are more precise than decimals but they're annoying to
work with, so we generally don't. You can represent any possible
number with a fraction. But like decimals, how precise you get
depends how far you want to go.
And even with fractions, like with decimals, you can keep going
and going and going and going like with the square root of 2.
Why?
Because a number line JUST isn't enough for some ideas.
If you take an ax and chop the number two perfectly in half, and
the two parts of the number line bend DOWN - where is the point
where the two sides will cut?
The number system just can't turn that into a simple number,
whether decimal or fraction. All we an do is get closer and
closer and closer and closer but we'll never quite reach it.
The problem quantum stuff is in our way of thinking. We want
everything black and white, but there's not only colors but
there's the WHOLE spectrum of waves a photon can make that we
CAN'T see and some we can barely measure properly.
And then, there's what happens when electricity turns into
magnetism and magnetism into electricity - or north turns to
south and south to north.
There's a rotation in a higher dimension; is the source of the
rotation from the inside or the outside? Is it God (external or
internal or both, depending on your view of God) or is it the
interplay of an unbalanced triangle of charges always trying to
smooth itself out (internal) or started from the outside as a
two M-Branes in a higher dimension briefly making contact and
causing this Universe (external)?
We keep trying to squish squares into triangles.
And its the key to our technological future.
That's the genius of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle: ''We
can't know exactly the position and velocity at the same time''
or ''we can't know the magnitude precisely'' and gave physicists
a handy-dandy little equation that could stick into all of
Maxwell's 19th century equations and play around with it.
It allowed us as a species to move forward, pretending we're
working with squares, counting everything, and it lets us smooth
out the diagonal edge of the triangle in a whole bunch of ways
(gloss over our imprecisions) to achieve new frontiers in
technology.
But personally, I think the future will lie in making use of the
powers of analog (smoother but less precise and noisier) using
what we've learned from the digital realm (precision).
And it will take a new way of thinking for us to stop trying to
fit those squares into triangles. I don't know what it is yet,
but someone will get the Eureka and figure it out. -Kenneth
Udut, June 22, 2014
