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Tuesday, February 10, 2009

2113

What's in a number but something incredibly simple to take and twist your mind around. They say people that find systems in numbers are absolutely insane, however the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio were only the products of some one else's concentrated madness. I've broken down numbers in my day for something to do, finding correlations here and there just to make time go by, making coincidences where there were no coincidences before.

I guess people have been doing this forever. I used to do it in church. This like has five syllables, this one has seven, this one eight four two. I'd
 do some foolish little simple math to make all these numbers add and subtract to equal the number of the hymn we'd sing next. I would tell my mother, and make predictions using my new system.

They were never right.

I think this fascination with numbers is the reason I want to work with physics so badly. They don't let anything get out of their control, they just create a constant that makes everything work out perfectly for them. Take Coulomb's law for example:

Coulomb came up with his constant, or K, which equals out to about roughly 9000000000. Just roughly though. What this constant does, is it makes sure that the resulting answer, which in this case is always a force, is measured in newtons and newtons only. Basically, he let the equation equal an unknown, solved for it, several times, and through a common answer found his constant. Endless work for the facilitation of many other physicists.

Take Paul Dirac for example. He used a multitude of different constants to find out how to explain nearly every property of any electron:


 (There was one problem, he found that the answer for charge could be positive or negative, thus leading to suspicion and in turn mathematical proof of antimatter.) His equation was confusing, but it just goes to show that numbers can have extreme power over us. Telling us that the world is in fact mirrored by another.

So I used to sit in church and fiddle my thumbs and make up numbers. If I'd known I could make a constant to fix all of it back then, I would have. It would have made my life so much easier. I could have been a prodigy. Too bad for me I suppose.

I feel bad for constants in differentiable calculus, they're always over looked because they're insignificant when you derive.


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