Essay 1: Unnoticed Dimensions of Knowledge

Let’s “get down to cases” right now:

  1. You learn decimals and fractions in school. You see that 1/2 can be written as 0.5 or 0.50 or with as many zeros as you like. That seems “clean.”

But 1/3 is equal to something more complex (i.e., 0.3 recurring or repeating, like 0.3333 and so on infinitely).  If you divide 1 by three you keep getting three.

Imagine you want to experiment a bit, and multiply the fraction 1/3 by three and the 0.3 recurring by three, thus not affecting things since you’re doing the same thing to both sides of the equation.

You get:  1 = 0.9 recurring or repeating.

You’re suddenly puzzled: How can 1 be obtained by adding “slices of 9 fractions” (i.e., 9/10 + 9/100 + 9/1000) to infinity. How do you get to the end? What end? 

It turns out that it’s not that simple to get a grip on all this.  A person who allowed themselves to become fascinated by this specific conundrum would enter a “beautiful ocean” of mathematics beginning with so elementary a phenomenon.

This shows you a deep connection between a part (e.g., the fraction and decimal 1/3 and 0.3 recurring) and the wider world or domain or universe of numbers.

How can it be that such a simple elementary “thing” becomes so intricate, deep and elusive?

  1. Let’s jump over to an entirely different kind of example. Think of Dinesen’s novel Out of Africa. Remember the movie with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.

Suppose you turn the movie “inside out” and “upside down” and ask: is this movie about coffee and coffee bushes, coffee markets and coffee growing, in a colonial context?  The coffee plantation is near Nairobi (today’s Kenya) and involves plantation economics, colonial relations with Kikuyu peoples, German-British colonial tensions around World War I.

Suppose I take the “backstory” and make that the “frontstory”.

The story of “economic botany” (coffee growing is one case) and colonial tensions between and among Europeans as well as Europeans and Africans is the deeper and larger story while the “musical beds” of the Westerners is a colorful footnote.   

We have the perennial question of “parts and wholes” which is one theme of this book.       

  1. Why does science “orbit” some numbers such as π (pi) (i.e., 22/7)?

You learn in school that there’s a ratio called π (pi) which is 22/7. Think of π (pi) as some kind of essence of circularity. Remember πr2 and 2πr in grade school.

Why does it keep appearing in almost every equation of physics? Why would “circleness” “haunt” science and math? Probability and statistical theory are dependent on π (pi) as a variable. Why?

You could peruse:

A History of Pi is a 1970 non-fiction book by Petr Beckmann that presents a layman’s introduction to the concept of the mathematical constant π (pi)

Why does science “orbit” some numbers such as π (pi)?

This is an example of this quest for connectedness.