Bugs, Math, God

Disclaimer: This summer update turned into a brief rant about mathematics and spirituality.

If you were to take the total weight of all of the bugs on earth, it would be greater than the weight of all of the other animals combined.  Any reasonable alien would conclude that Earth is a planet mostly inhabited by things that crawl, buzz, and swim lazily in half-full beer glasses.

weeds

I feel like we could host an entomology conference in our master bath here at the house.  Having been too lazy to reinstall the screens in the windows, but preferring fresh air moving through the house, we end up with bugs all over the place.  Most of them are passers through and we turn on the big, noisy exhaust fan in the ceiling to suck them back into the stratosphere before bed.  Some are probably never-before-seen species.  My only conclusion is that bugs are mating in new ways.  We have mosquitos with dragon fly wings, beetles with tiny elephant trunks, and some kinda ant-beetle-ladybug hybrid going on.  But it’s summer in the Appalachians and it’s their planet.  You can’t travel to another country and complain that there’s locals everywhere.

Jude pretending to be on psychedelics by lying on the floor and say “Whoa, man” over and over.

The longer days have me realizing that we are firmly out of winter and its indoor routines.  Homeschool has wound down from a rigid daily practice to a half-ass whimsical exploration of intermittent curiosity. Jude and I have been reading about the history of hip-hop and watching a lot of music videos.  Stella is studying for the SAT and I’ve been offering emotional support by demonstrating that adults are also incapable of most of the problems.  Fanny has taken over math with Jude for a while, and her approach to using pushups as a consequence for inattentiveness is something that I had never considered.  I often imagine our children as adults having plenty of amusing stories to tell about their childhood.

Thomas on section 10a of the French Broad

Looking back over winter journals, I see that I spent a lot of time on mathematics and trail running.  Growing up, I was ostensibly good at math from the public school standpoint; meaning that I often got the right answers to problems.  But I had no fascination with it, and really, it was kinda like pushups, something somebody made you do.  You quit as soon as you were allowed to.  Teaching math to kids has been a really different experience. With Jude, I’ve been on my second trip through a lot of this material and a lot of the resources we use are focused on seeing how various concepts are applied to stuff in the real world.  Squaring, cubing, tessellating, these are things you can get your hands on and play with.

Stella’s lodgings for the next 7 weeks as a helper at Camp Celo

Toward the end of the semester we got to one of my favorite topics in math which is dimensions, or what I like to think of as the space where Gawd comfortably resides.  (I’m using the word “gawd” here as a placeholder for whatever comes to mind when you try to put ineffable awe-inspiring mystery in a box).  I found a movie version of the book “Flatland” for Jude and I to watch.  The original book is old and has a lot of obscure British political satire.  The movie sticks with just the math parts.  The premise is that there is a world called Flatland, that is two-dimensional, and inhabited by squares, triangles, lines, etc.  They all live on a flat plane in a well ordered society until one of the squares is visited by a three dimensional sphere. The sphere has to go to great lengths to explain itself to these beings who have never imagined a third dimension; for them length and width is all there is.  The idea of depth or height is freakish and unimaginable.  To the inhabitants of flatland, the sphere is seen as a circle that expands and contracts as it passes through the thin plane of their world.

Jude, Pinto, and I on a quick trip through Lexington to see some of the best people in the world.

As three-dimensional beings looking at a two-dimensional world we have gawd-like powers.  If you imagine a stick figure on a piece of paper next to a square, you can imagine that the poor stick figure cannot see what is inside the square.  You, however, 3D Gawd that you are, can see both the inside and outside of the square.  You could even magically insert and remove things from the square without breaking it, much to the amazement of the stick figure.

Before you get cocky with your new found powers, the book “Flatland” was written to help us imagine what would happen if we encountered a four-dimensional being, and it gets real weird real fast.   

Imagine this poor, three-dimensional cat named Robert.  He can only see the outside of the three dimensional box the same way our stick figure could only see the outside of the square.  He has no idea if the box is full of dried squirrels or tofu.  You can see the consternation in his whiskers here.  But…and stick with me here…a four-dimensional being can see the inside and outside of the box at the same time.  It is the same way we can see the inside and outside of a two dimensional square at the same time.  (Technically they can also see the inside and outside of Robert at the same time but that gets a lot harder to imagine involves seeing fur in unpleasant places) This hypothetical 4D being could also insert and remove dried squirrels from the box without opening it.  Admittedly this is fairly impossible to really understand or conceptualize because our entire thinking apparatus is based in 3 dimensions, with the exception of our imagination, which becomes a very useful tool all of the sudden.

Bent Creek tribe on Holiday

If we imagine that the dimension we are going to add to the 3 that we are used to is time, it makes for a thought experiment that, to me, has some profound results.  We can measure time but we cannot move within it, except in one direction.  A consciousness that could move within and around time would not see objects at a point in time, but would see their entire duration.  This consciousness that could interact with the inside of an object without changing it and could see that object over its entire existence becomes very close to the notion of Gawd itself. I find this to be an interesting place in physics that does not require me to assume the existence of a soul, the necessity of magic, giant arks full of animals, or any exception to the laws of the universe that we are accustomed to.  You could say it’s one of the first ways I’ve found to add a spiritual dimension to my life.

Headed to the Mermaid Festival for Stella’s 16th birthday party

The more I listen to the cacophonous nonsense of hysterically opinionated chatterboxes that fill the gigabytes of faux interactions known as social media, the more I want my kids to understand that being right is generally an illusion and that being wrong is an opportunity to learn something.  Science is the process of being wrong efficiently.  It has no other agenda than making ignorance as brief as possible.  The sum total of what we know about ourselves and the universe is a thin fraction of what we do not know.  There is plenty of room in our world for mystery, awe, and miracles without resorting to dogmatism, proselytizing, or the desperately insecure yelping of those who need to fell like they are “right” about something.

Let’s go be wrong in useful ways.  Let’s look for dimensions we can’t imagine.