Useful insight

[varshax]

I attended a Montessori school for the first few years of my schooling, and while I was always aware that this experience directly contributed to many aspects of my life, now I am beginning to think that I have no idea of the extant to which it made a difference. Yesterday the trainer at the gym rolled out a mat to do some core work and I remarked

Comments

[shortindiangirl]

Wonder if there's more to it than Montessori. I did not go to to Montessori school, but I too have this great need for visualizing and details. This is one reason that I could not continue my education in Physics and had to stop at the Bachelor of Arts level in undergrad. (3 more courses would have made this a B.Sc. Physics as opposed to a B.A. Physics). I needed to visualize dimensions - 5th dimension and onwards. And naturally, this is painful at best and impossible at worst. And the layers upon layers of assumptions that both computational and theoretical Physics is built on did not suit my needs. It seemed to me that the assumptions were self referential, and without a true visualization, I could not verify that it was not. I decided then that my right brained needs to "feel" the Physics overtook my left brained ability to "prove" the Physics

[varshax]

I guess this need for visualization could come from many sources .... methinks mine is less likely to be inherent as I dont have your artistic inclination or education. In those first few years, I probably learnt how to learn - and I still fall back on the tools I picked up then (pictorial cues for example).

Experiencing infinity ..... I have no idea what that is :)

Interestingly enough, I dont find it hard to visualize multiple dimensions .... and that is most likely because of my background in coding theory (Codes are visualised as vector subspaces) so for me that too is a learnt-trait.

Sounds like a very interesting book ...

Experiencing infinity

[shortindiangirl]

I think the education that I sought was probably because of my need to visualize things. Perhaps somehow I too learned how to learn by visualizing, who knows ? Or perhaps my brain is precluded to learning that way because it is unable to process un-visual lists as well

Re: Experiencing infinity

[varshax]

Thats a really interesting experiment .... with very interesting results. Your narrative reminds me of scenes from "That 70s show".
And coding theory is not very complicated ..... there are some involved concepts but those even I dont remember at this point :) My memory is definitely DRAM ... fundas die quickly if they are not refreshed.

[oldhen]

I needed to visualize dimensions - 5th dimension and onwards.

Hmmm, this is a hard one for most people to wrap their minds around I think (hope)- here's an attempt to paint a four-dimensional object by Dali- someone who knew a thing or two about both warped spaces and dope ;-) You can kind of theoretically extrapolate what mutiple spatial dimensions would look like, like in this Wikipedia article, but can you really see it? Theoretically I can guess what a four-dimensional cube would look like, and sort of follow how you can get from that to the Dali cross, like the article explains, but can't really "see" the tesseract. From here you can kind of theoretically extrapolate to five spatial dimensions and so on and so forth

[varshax]

No no .... I completely agree with you that a n-dimensional observer cannot accurately "see" any more dimensions. But thats because the function "see" is defined by the medium we use to do so. When I say visualise n-dimensional space, I actually mean something to the effect of "understand and feel comfortable with". So in my view (heh heh) there is a difference between "see" and "visulaise" here .... but I agree that its wicked of me to not define my variables ;)

And Dali ..... fun guy ... interesting illusionist ... but I dont see the new dimensions. IMO, n-dimensional space is better defined by geometry.

[oldhen]

but I dont see the new dimensions.

The Wikipedia tesseract article has a little animation that sort of tries to explain it..

[varshax]

Yeah ... He's trying to explain using geometry ... the picture does not do the theory justice though. Like we talked about before, the medium is limited by its dimensions. I only saw an image on the page .... was there a link to the animation ?

[oldhen]

was there a link to the animation ?

Mea culpa, here's the right link..