http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7JIjQLJYm8
Thought people here may like this. I had a blast watching this.
Imagining the Tenth Dimension
Imagining the Tenth Dimension
Throwing my life away for this whole Fusion mess.
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- Posts: 62
- Joined: Wed Jun 27, 2007 9:38 pm
Recurring Themes in Mathematics
The Pythagoreans (~500 BC) were first to theorize that the universe could be understood through numbers.
"The importance of pure numbers is central to the Pythagorean view of the world. A point was associated with 1, a line with 2 a surface with 3 and a solid with 4. Their sum, 10, was sacred and omnipotent."
http://phyun5.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/N ... ode32.html
Their mathematical philosophy inspired Plato (~400 BC) to derived the five unique convex regular polyhedrons, today known as the Platonic Solids.
"They are unique in that the faces, edges and angles are all congruent."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid
Euclid (~300 BC) summarized the Platonic Solids in his textbook The Elements. This remained the principle tool for teaching mathematics for the next 2000 years. Only Newton surpassed it with his textbook The Principia Mathematica in which he derived the foundations of Calculus, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and the Laws of Motion.
While most of us struggle to understand Newton's Laws, some gifted academics have gone further, creating Boolean Algebra, and all the other mathematical theorems all the way up to The Standard Model.
While Robert Bussard applied the geometry of Platonic Solids (truncated polyhedrons) to create what might be the simplest fusion reactor ever conceived,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
others are imagining geometries that could be used to design machines not yet conceived....
Consider the geometry of E8, a 2-dimensional projection of a 248-dimension manifold Lie Algebra, which neatly describes one possible solution to quantum gravity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_(mathematics)
YouTube has some amazing videos of E8.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xHw9zcC ... re=related
"The importance of pure numbers is central to the Pythagorean view of the world. A point was associated with 1, a line with 2 a surface with 3 and a solid with 4. Their sum, 10, was sacred and omnipotent."
http://phyun5.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/N ... ode32.html
Their mathematical philosophy inspired Plato (~400 BC) to derived the five unique convex regular polyhedrons, today known as the Platonic Solids.
"They are unique in that the faces, edges and angles are all congruent."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid
Euclid (~300 BC) summarized the Platonic Solids in his textbook The Elements. This remained the principle tool for teaching mathematics for the next 2000 years. Only Newton surpassed it with his textbook The Principia Mathematica in which he derived the foundations of Calculus, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and the Laws of Motion.
While most of us struggle to understand Newton's Laws, some gifted academics have gone further, creating Boolean Algebra, and all the other mathematical theorems all the way up to The Standard Model.
While Robert Bussard applied the geometry of Platonic Solids (truncated polyhedrons) to create what might be the simplest fusion reactor ever conceived,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
others are imagining geometries that could be used to design machines not yet conceived....
Consider the geometry of E8, a 2-dimensional projection of a 248-dimension manifold Lie Algebra, which neatly describes one possible solution to quantum gravity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_(mathematics)
YouTube has some amazing videos of E8.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xHw9zcC ... re=related