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jupyterdream · 2 years

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The Villain Named Gravity: Chapter 1

This is something I posted on AO3, and figured I could post it here too. It's going to be multi-chapter story about you and 3 ocs of mine (who are you best friends in the story) getting isekaied to the world of Genshin Impact. Genshin impact character won't show up until at least chapter three.

Summary: When the world starts to fall apart, the four genius will not allow its passing without at least trying to prevent it. But after a single miscalculation of the geodesic equation, the four of you end up in a world you know nothing about.

Your only objective to protect your friends. You could care less about anyone else.

So then... Why is it that the longer you stay here, the more difficult it becomes to see the two wanderers hurt...?

---

You're a psychopathic genius who gets isekaied to the world of Genshin impact with your three also genius yet chaotic friends. There, Tomoaki and Kazuha crosses path with you, leading you to a spiral of insanity.

Warnings: DARK CONTENT, reader is psychopathic, read is manipulative, it'll mostly be cheerful (especially in the first few chapters), ooc, mild dubious consent, no genshin characters will show up in the first two chapters, enemies to lover, friends to lovers, a lot of scientific jargon, reader is female, female pronouns, don't know if I'll actually commit to continuing the story so be prepared... do not interact if any of the above makes you uncomfortable. I'm not used to tumblr yet so my first few posts may not look as pretty. Sorry about that. (Many of these are for the story as a whole, this chapter is pretty tame.)

Pairings: Kaedehara Kazuha x Reader, Tomo x Reader

Everyone ready then? Alright, let's get going.

The Villain Named Gravity

This was the end.

The world crumbled under your feet. The screams of people could be heard from all four directions that the winds blew from, the sky wept tears of acid, burning your cheeks as it mixed with your tears. It was over, that’s probably what you would have thought as you stared at the despair that filled the world you once loved, the signs of apocalypse stretching to the horizon.

That was until you heard the familiar voices behind you.

“Crap! Crap! Crap! The fuse blew up!”

“Guys, where did you put the geiger counter?! Kind of in the middle of something here?!”

“Uhm, I think I forgot to square the denominator? The electric field seems… wrong?”

You turned back towards your three friends, all working on the different aspects of the machine you had built together. The machine that became the final hope of this dying world you once called home. After a second of collecting your thoughts, you rushed towards them, grabbing an extra fuse that rested on top of the work table along the way.

“Did you guys calculate the geodesic correctly?! Remember that the geometry of space-time will change once we activate the machine! If we want to end up in the correct time period–”

“I’ll get on that as soon as I’m done here!” Your friend who was fixing the blown fuse screamed. He was always considered the leader of your friend group, often being the one to gather everyone, even gathering people for this elaborate and improbable plan, “Toss those extra wires and fuse and I’ll get around to it! You go ahead and make sure the gravitational force is correct!”

You nodded at your leader then tossed him some wires, as well as the fuse you picked up along the way. He catches it without looking, giving you a small nod of appreciation, and getting to work immediately.

“Are you sure?” Another friend of yours pauses, looking away from his geiger counter that he found under the chair he was working on. This one was often the most logical, the ‘calm one’ as you had dubbed in your thoughts, “She’s better at general relativity, she should be the one to–”

“We don’t have time!” The leader yelled, “She’s the only one who actually understands the amount of gravitational force we’ll need! We all understand the geodesic equations!”

The calm friend frowned, but decided that arguing would get him nowhere and went back to his own work. After listening in on their conversations, you rushed over to the computer screen filled with numbers and equations that had practically been glued to your brain. You started with the calculations. Everything must be perfect. Not even a single mistake would be allowed… In the meantime, the last friend finished calculating the electric field and she jumped up from her chair with the clipboard. She was always the cheerful one of the group, one in charge of lighting up the mood when everyone seemed down. “Eureka! I got it! Leave the electromagnetic forces to me!” She rushed over to the computer right next to yours, and started typing away.

“Fixed the fuse and got the geodesic.” Your leader smirked in satisfaction as he turned to the rest of the group, “Status update?!”

“Gravitational force seems correct!” You exclaimed.

“Electric fields were adjusted accordingly!” Your cheerful friend exclaimed next to you, her bubbly voice cheering up the room in an instant.

“The radiation seems fine, the lagrangian of electroweak force seems fine…” Your calm friend who was staring at the geiger counter and his phone simultaneously mumbled under his breath, looking calm compared to the rest of the group members.

The leader nodded in satisfaction, “Alright, it’s now or never then.”

That comment made you realize just how much louder the screams were compared to just a few minutes earlier. At this very moment, the world you all lived in is dying away, killed by the greed of humanity, unable to sustain life that depended on it. That was when the four of you decided that the best course of action would be to try and save the world using all of your brilliance. The four geniuses agreed to create a time machine, hoping to stop the destruction of your world before it even started.

The leader activated the machine, making a loud noise that made you jump 5 feet in the air from surprise. Everything should be perfect, every calculation, every component, no mistakes could be forgiven.

That was, until the four of you started noticing the abnormal behaviors from the machine. Excessive heat, discomforting noises, and the sense that everything was going out of control…

It was too late to stop the machine, the last thing you heard were the screams of your friends, the last thing you saw were bright lights, and then the world fell silent. Everything seemed lost, the four people who could have saved the world had failed.

That was what you thought, oh, how very wrong you were.

*******

“....W… p…. Wake up darn it!”

You woke up on a hill that sang with the birds above, and the first thing you saw was infinite blue. How strange, it almost looks like the blue sky you used to admire, before the corruption of mankind turned it red. You blinked a couple of times before scanning your surroundings, though your vision was still blurred. Eventually, your eyes cleared up to reveal three familiar faces.

“....You guys?” You whispered before sitting up on the soft green grass. Your body aches all over, making you wince, but the soft breeze on your skin and the fresh air made you feel a little bit better.

“Aaah! I thought you died! I’m so glad!!” The cheerful friend throws her hands around you and starts sobbing, while your other two argues in the background.

“Told you we should have left the geodesic equation to her.”

“I said I was sorry, okay?! We made it back in time so does it really matter?!”

“My body hurts, so yeah, kinda.”

You watched the three chaos unfold in front of you and chuckle a little. This made your three friends baffled. All of that danger they put you through, and you were laughing? After chuckling to yourself a bit, you gave them a warm smile, a smile you haven’t shown since the world started falling apart.

“I’m glad I have you guys, you know?”

The cheerful friend looked more emotional than before and started wailing as she hugged you tighter. You regretted making her more emotional than she was before, because now you couldn’t breathe. The leader grinned in satisfaction at your response while the calm one looked away, with a tint of pink covering his cheeks. Though neither of them bothered helping you get out of the deathening grip of the cheerful one’s love.

“See? At least someone appreciates all the work I put in!” The leader hissed at your calm friend, “And we’re back in time before the world went to shit, so mission accomplished right?!”

Your calm friend looked around, his analyzing eyes sent shivers down your spine. You knew that it was never a good sign when he had those looks in his eyes. “...Not so fast, I don’t think we actually ended up where we wanted to.”

“What do you mean?” Your friend who finished bawling her eyes out finally lets go of you, allowing you to finally breathe a little.

“I mean, just look at it.” He pointed ahead into the distance, after following his gaze, you quickly realized what he meant and gasped in horror. Up ahead was not the city the four of you were just in, but instead a strange city you have never even seen before. No, specifically speaking, you have seen something similar before, but never in person. The black tiled roof on top of cemented walls, cherry blossoms filling all the spaces between the buildings, the large building decorated in purple… It almost looks like…

“Feudal Japan…?” You mumbled under your breath. At this point, the confident smile of your leader faded, replaced by an expression of worry, panic, and regret.

“What the fuck did I dooooo?!” He screamed as he held his head with both hands.

“Calm down! It was an accident, right?” The calm friend broke out of his usual cool nature, worried that the leader blames himself for the situation.

“Weren’t you making fun of him a little while ago?” Your happy friend giggled, though you hear the hint of worry mixed with her bubbly voice. You watched the three of them interact with panic from a distance. Realizing that staring blankly at your panicky friends won’t make the situation any better, you decided to check your surroundings once more.

But as soon as you tried to get up, you noticed that something fell off of your lap. Confused, you looked down towards the grass to check. By your side was a circular and black gem that had something that looked like the center of gravity symbol inside it. The glass itself was decorated with some sort of metal frame, and it had a substantial amount of weight. You were sure that nothing like this existed in the lab you four were working in a few minutes ago, so you assumed it found itself on your lap when you were teleported here.

“Hey guys check this out.” You called, and your three friends decided to pause their bickering for a small moment to look at the gem inside your hand.

“What is this?” The calm friend mumbled, tracing his index finger on the surface of the gem.

“It looks cool, like an anime merch!” The cheery friend giggled.

“Hey wait a minute!” The leader paused, “I saw something similar to this earlier! Just a sec…” He rushes over towards the patch of ground he was standing on and fishes out another gem from between the grass. His gems, instead of being black, were red with symbols of atoms inside.

“Lol! Yours has a diagram of an atom on it!” The cheerful friend chuckled. The leader pouted playfully.

“Well I like atoms! I’m an atomic physicist after all! So I think it fits! And better than not having a cool anime-merch.”

“Anime-merch…” The clam friend mumbled under his breath as he reached into his pant pocket. He shuffled around a bit before pulling out another gem, a green one with the GHS hazard pictogram inside. This made all of you laugh.

“You’re radioactive! You’re radioactive!” The leader grinned, and the clam friend shook his head in disbelief. He turned to your cheery friend, which made her let out a little “oh” before she began searching around her. Eventually, she found a blue gem which had symbols of what seemed to be lightning and magnet on it on the ground she was standing by.

Staring at the four gems, you think for a little bit, before a sudden realization hits you.

“Gravity, electromagnetism, strong force and weak force…” You whispered. The calm friend nodded in agreement.

“Huh? What? What’s going on? I’m not following.” The leader panicked. The calm friend sighed in disbelief.

“You know? For someone labeled a genius by everyone, you’re not very bright, are you?”

“Shut up! I’m good at physics! Not cryptic words!”

“So, what about the four fundamental forces?” The cheery friend asks you, and you nod.

“All these gems are corresponding to a fundamental force we’re most familiar with. My research is on general relativity and gravity, so I got gravity…”

“And my research is on radioactive decay caused by the nuclear weak force,” The calm friend added, “So I got the nuclear weak force.”

“Oooh! I see!” The cheery friend grinned, clapping her hands in delight, “Since my research is focused on building circuits, I'm electromagnetism!”

“So… I’m The strong force? Since my research is AMO with an emphasis on the elementary particles?” The leader laughs, proudly, “Ahaha! Alright! I’m the strongest!”

You nod at him with a slight smile on your face, “As you should.”

The leader seemed encouraged by your affirmation and he announced to the rest of the group, “Guys! I’ve decided! Until we finish our mission of saving our world! Let’s call each other by the names given to us by this anime merch! Thus, from now on, my name is ‘Strong Force!’ Let it be a reminder that we, the four geniuses, are the savior of the world! Ahaha! Didn’t I sound cool?”

Your calm friend, who was to be known as the Weak Force, shook his head in disbelief, as your cheery friend now named Electromagnetism cheered with excitement.

And you, now you were to be known as Gravity, the weakest of the four fundamental forces. But you didn’t mind, after all, you knew that your strength didn’t come from raw power, even before you ventured into this world.

Your strength is your audacity. Audacity to stand strong, even if you’re the weakest.

#kaedehara x you #kaedehara kazuha x reader #genshin tomo #tomo x reader #genshin x reader #yandere reader #The Villain Named Gravity

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incarnateirony · 4 months

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...how does one even fuck up sacred geometry that badly... its a fucking circle. The magic is in the circle. It's the squaring of the circle not the dotting of the circle, you dumb cunt.

You're confusing "I drew pretty pictures with a mirror feature" with being a mystic. Stop that. Read the goddamn books. Jesus we really will have to drag this woman either to an asylum or magical kindergarten until she knows what a Circle fucking is and why it matters and how it functions holy fuck. WHICH HOLE DO WE PUT THE CIRCLE SHAPE IN KIDS??????????? THATS RIGHT. IN THE FUCKING CIRCLE HOLE. DO WE KNOW WHAT A FUCKING CIRCLE IS KIDS.

God how retarded and lack of understanding ARE YOU. The POINT is it being a continuous line/flow you absolute FUCKING doorknob.

This shit is truly all her playing in aesthetics and hoping someone thinks she's magic while, I cannot emphasize enough, spewing octopus jibberish as prophecy, admitting her sanity has been questioned before, and being observed by a ring of therapists who didn't believe me that she was acting this retarded but, lo and behold, they realized, this is in fact possible.

I have yet again been told she needs tested for schizoaffective disorder if she actually believes this instead of lying to herself and others. Cuz otherwise the option is she legitimately thinks the octopus babble gods are communicating to her and her alone a deep truth no wizard or mystic or psychologist has ever discovered, with such vast octopus truths that the books of the octopus god itself don't even matter, just the voices in her head, and guys, I don't know how to make it clearer. That there's schizophrenia.

Goddamn, the bitch basically tried to knock off the design of the glyph used for Xorvintaal's structure but is such an uneducated cunt she managed to fuck up circles. It's a goddamn skill at this point. Considering our array of active audience watching her shit from shrinks to muggles, I'm half wondering if he's intentionally pulling her retard reigns to make a perfect example of How To Be The Biggest Fucking Knob. Today's funny revelation: Shealyn doesn't know what the fuck sacred geometry is or why even simple shapes like circles have meanings, or what those meanings are, or how they work, but calling her lazy mirror drawings Sacred Geometry sounds better than "I drew a bunch of lines"

Things aren't sacred just because they came out of your fucking head, Shealyn. Motherfucking Chuck and Larry somehow managed to get this right with their random racist chinese guy and you're still fucking it up.

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spacemiddenzz · 3 years

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so i was watching @super-metroid's stream of Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass (highly recommend by the way) and she fought Imaginary Numbers this time. I guess I just wanted to share my thoughts on it, since it's my favorite boss and all. This is gonna be a longpost and it's gonna have spoilers so the whole thing can be found under the cut.

So, to put it simply, this dungeon is about stress and confusion. It's about Jimmy's mind frantically trying to comprehend the high-level math that Andrew is teaching him on top of his schoolwork. Jimmy thinks that his dad is the smartest man in the world- this is hyperbole for sure, but the fact that Andrew is quite intelligent remains clear. Jimmy looks up to Andrew because of his intelligence- and because of this it means a lot to Jimmy to be praised by Andrew. He wants his dad to view him as intelligent as well, because, if a man as smart as Andrew thinks Jimmy is smart, he can't be wrong! And hell, it feels nice to be validated by your parents.

Clearly, Andrew has already recognized Jimmy's talent with numbers and has started teaching him concepts beyond the second-grade curriculum, something that we see in the flashbacks in the Symmetrical Cavern. However if Imaginary Numbers' design is anything to go by, these concepts may be at or above the high school level. They're too much for Jimmy to understand. He's only eight, and his mind just isn't ready for that yet. Still, he feels the pressure to keep up with- and understand- the work that Andrew gives him. Why? Because he fears failure. He worries that if he admits to his father that the work is too hard, Andrew won't see him as a "smart boy" any longer- and that praise and validation means a lot to Jimmy. He doesn't want to lose it.

Let's start with the song that plays during this nightmare dungeon- Counting Backwards From Infinity. From the erratic bassline to the random samples of people shouting numbers in no particular order over and over again, this song simply screams disorder and panic. As a person who has always struggled with math, it's incredibly relatable. Counting Backwards From Infinity always reminded me of taking math tests in high school. I was so slow that I almost never could finish a test in a single class period. The frantic, wild bass and the cacophony of people screaming numbers out of order reminded me of trying desperately to remember how to solve a type of problem- and do it quickly enough so that I could hand the test in before the bell rang. I imagine that this is how Jimmy feels when Andrew places in front of him a concept that the boy does not fully understand. Perhaps he's had it explained to him several times but still can't fully grasp it (likely because, again, the kid is eight). The wild confusion and stress he feels when he doesnt fucking understand what's in front of him and doesnt want to look like an idiot in front of his dad. Even the name of the song is a reference to the fact that at this stage of his life this stuff may be an insurmountable task.

The dungeon itself is also set up in an incredibly confusing way. There's a bunch of bizarre-looking purple structures and winding paths. You teleport all over the place with no particular rhyme or reason. The enemies in this area, too, are deformed geometrical shapes that are almost Lovecraftian in the way that they cannot be understood. To Jimmy, Andrew's teachings might as be as comprehensible as a Lumpagon or a Squiggles, and that's definitely the idea that one gets here. The confusion, the pressure, the panic.

At one point in the dungeon you're teleported to a fakeout area that looks like the Path of Enlightenment. This is my favorite thing about the Asymmetrical Cavern, because of the fact that it has so many cool secrets, but also because it gave me a feeling that I could (once again) relate to. Jimmy's teleportation to the Path of Enlightenment isn't random. It represents familiarity in a sea of confusion. Jimmy sees something he recognizes during Andrew's lessons. Maybe he thinks that he's finally got the hang of it- that he's studied hard enough and now all of this jargon makes sense- only to be rudely awakened by the fact that he's been doing it wrong and never understood the concept in the first place. Even the secrets kind of hint at this. If you speak to pointman in this part of the dungeon he says "I am the blood of numbers leaking from your ears. The nails of ignorance are already being driven into your brain. What point is there in giving voice to madness?" (which is metal as fuck by the way)

Jimmy just thinks that his inability to understand makes him an idiot. His lack of understanding- the nails of ignorance- are being driven into his brain. If he can't understand all of Andrew's teachings, maybe he was never a smart boy after all.

And finally let's talk about Imaginary Numbers itself. First of all, it's an amalgamation of a bunch of different mathematical symbols, including a tombstone, a slashed epsilon, and a sigma. I'm sure there are more, but those are the only ones I recognized, honestly. Given that dreams don't really make things up, instead just taking things that you have seen/experienced before, it looks like Jimmy has encountered some... seriously advanced shit. Tombstones are used in geometric proofs. I only started doing proofs in high school geometry, meaning that Jimmy may very well be learning concepts meant for kids twice his age. No wonder the poor kid is stressed.

Oh yeah, also the boss sucks ass to fight. I've heard some people call that bad game design, but I'm not sure that's how I'd classify it. Sure, like I said, the boss sucks complete ass to fight and is almost entirely RNG-dependent. From a gameplay standpoint, this is wack as hell, yeah. Fucking 30% chance to deflect any magical or physical attack with a 30% chance to dodge a physical attack on top of that? Definitely bad game design. But from an artistic standpoint? Not at all. In fact, the futility of this fight adds to it. It really drills into your head that the only thing on your side here is pure fucking luck. And the odds aren't in your favor.

The feeling of futility- of the fact that this may in fact be, by all definitions, an insurmountable task for Jimmy, really struck home the situation. The battle would not be nearly as impactful without this. And personally, I'm all for it. Imagine walking into the Asymmetrical Cavern for the first time, not knowing what to expect. You get your ass handed to you on a silver platter by Imaginary Numbers after it chains Program Omega at you five times in a row.

That's the feeling Kasey wanted to give you. And it's critical. It's just... so perfect, I honestly don't know how to put it into words. It was supposed to represent the confusion and turmoil of a task nigh insurmountable. And it did the job pretty damn well, if I do say so myself.

I know Jimmy is good at numbers and this wasn't supposed to represent a real struggle with the subject of math/the concept of numbers in general, but hot damn if I didn't feel seen. Except Jimmy is eight but I was like 17 struggling in precalc with the same shit. I guess we know Jimmy's smarter than I am rip

TLDR; andrew please stop putting unnecessary stress on your kid youre freaking him out

anyway if you guys have any thoughts about this boss or this dungeon in general i would love to hear them. but where im at its like 2 AM so im probably gonna it the mf sack for now. later dudes

#jimmy and the pulsating mass #jatpm #analysis #theory #my thoughts #longpost #textpost #nightmare boss #if i had to fight this boss in real life i would simply pass away #jatpm spoilers #jimmy and the pulsating mass spoilers #yeah

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lewisgour · 4 years

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Confession & Revelation

Confession & Revelation,

ok a smidge over dramatic ;)

Revelation,

Quick[er] cooling of fission nuclear reactors can likely be achieved without the headaches of highly reactive sodium & potassium.

The take-away on examining a sodium potassium fission nuclear reactor is to have

QUICK[er] COOLING

one must

CHANGE/MORPH THE GEOMETRY

of the uranium [or plutonium] so it isn't cross reacting. So the freed neutrons from one decay event are very unlikely to fly off & hit another uranium nucleus & cause it to decay as a result.

One doesn't have to use a sodium & potassium fluid to do this, one can use mechanical re-arrangement instead.

my perception is that most nuclear fuel assemblies [arrangement of fuel rods] is a long shaft of rods in a square footprint.

To make this adaptable to re-arranging one needs merely make the assemblies into rows of fuel rods that can be slid face to face to create the square footprint for maximum heating/interaction and then slid out of the square footprint into edge to edge [long flat plane] arrangements to facilitate a greatly reduced cross reaction of uranium.

i realize that fiddling with nuclear fuel assemblies is not something one wants to do casually, but the fact that it will probably reduce the cross interactions by perhaps 80 to 90 percent make it more than worth the effort.

[for the centrally positioned fuel rods -> 360 degrees of a circle minus 20 degrees for the two rods either side on the row makes a 340/360 proportion difference; 94% possible reduction;

for the corner fuelrods -> 90 degrees minus 20 degrees proportionally 70/90; 77% possible reduction; for the mid-outside fuelrods 180 degrees minus 20 degrees is a proportion of 160/180; 88% possible reduction]

If i am approximately correct this could probably done as a retro-fit and be incorporated into all future designs to make a vastly safer design of fission reactors.

It wouldn't be as quick cool as a sodium potassium nuclear fission reactor, but would go a very good margin in that direction.

I don't know if this might be used as an alternative to dropping carbon rods or not, but it's a possibility.

definitely for maintainence shutdowns this makes sense

& most importantly

for emergency shutdowns the ability to much more quickly cool the core elements to avoid meltdown is absolutely critical.

if the above is correct it could be the most potentially useful of all my diatribe(s).

Now my Embarassing Confession

& why one should exercise caution if reading/listening to my off the cuff 'conclusions'.

you may know my complete dismissal of dark matter,

well ...

i probably opened my mouth & inserted my foot prematurely.

While i cited that dark matter has no effect on Sun local orbits/trajectories, this doesn't actually contradict current proposals of dark matter,

because in the vicinity of the Sun the expected as well as the proposed curvature/gravity is the same.

My bad. :(

With expected gravity [our planets around the Sun] the inner orbits are very fast where gravity is strong and the outer planets take hundreds of years to orbit where gravity is weak.

But the general approximation of observed galactic stellar action is all the stars rotate somewhat more like a CD disk, a phonograph record. Their RPU [Rotation Per Unit] is much more similar than it is with the gravity we observe locally.

The proposal of dark matter is a flat ring of matter that center on the galaxy's black hole.

It is hypothesized that this ring of dark matter pulls the stars that are close to the galactic center outward [slower orbit speed] & stars far from the galactic center inward [faster orbit speed].

And technically it works & may be correct,

but it has real challanges to overcome.

Dark Matter is hypothesized only for purposes of crafting an altered shape of gravity.

it seems to have no optical properties.

Why don't we find it clumping up around planets & stars?

why doesn't it migrate towards itself & the center of the galaxy over time?

Dark matter creates tremendous gravity, but itself seems unaffected by gravity?

another surprising property.

A ring of matter is both hard to produce & harder to sustain over billions of years.

Would it be orbiting with centripedal force to sustain the hollow center ring shape?

And this happens repeatedly for galaxy after galaxy?

We should find dark matter [if not its net gravity] in Earth's vicinity. So far no sign of it.

It seems likely that aggregated matter ring would constantly short-cut [self attract on a chord of a circle] the circular arc so it would likely contract over time even with orbital centripedal force.

How is it that this ring of matter is concentric & stays concentric with the center of all these m-o-v-i-n-g galaxies yet it is hollow/void in its own center?

Did the central black hole form by eating out the ring's center of dark matter? maybe but the mass would be all wrong.

I am pretty sure the black hole's mass/gravity is still far too tiny to fit with a uniform disk of dark matter cummulating all of the center portion to the central black hole.

the central black hole repells dark matter?

repelled by Hawking's radiation?

this might keep cycling dark matter ring concentric, but requires another unknown physics property.

I will include the fact that the size of each galactic central black hole seems to be proprotional to each amount of dark matter,

which points to some kind of interdependence.

Dark matter guides growth of supermassive black holes | Astronomy ...

www.astronomy.com › News

I will pose a different speculation,

namely that the

differentiated gravitational axises of stars may explain it.

the easiest way to conceptualize 3D space as the surface of a 4D domain is to scale it all down one dimension.

Think of space as the 2D surface [rubber sheet] that rests/floats in a 3D domain.

gravity's axis, at least as far as we have encountered it, is generally perpendicular to the/our local space 'horizon'.

think of a wire perpendicular to the rubber sheet that pushes the rubber sheet into a curved funnel shape. [arcing conic if you will]

since we know at pangalactic scales space is curved, necessarily, gravity [pushing wires] that are locally perpendicular are not going to be parallel to one another.

NOW think of a wire that encounters the rubber sheet in a not completely perpendicular direction, say at 45 degrees to illustrate.

the rubber sheet directly under the incline of the wire is tightest and the part immediately opposite is more relaxed/loose.

the black hole(s) at the center of the galaxy/galaxies extends, theoretically to infinity under the horizon of the rubber sheet pulling it almost to a straight line with no visible bottom ending.

i speculate that there is some influence of the black hole(s) that cause stellar gravity axises' lower/deeper end to be drawn towards the black hole's linear stretch.

there is also a counter property of the top of a gravity axis to stay relatively fixed in its spatial location.

while all the stars of a galaxy have some draw of the bottom of their gravity axis to the black holes, out away from the black hole this effect makes a more differentiated, noticible angle.

the stars near the black hole have their gravity axis bottom almost imperceptibly pulled in, which is still nearly parallel to the black hole's gravity axis [very little net change].

the outer stars have more freedom of space to flex so the gravity axis angle towards the black hole's gravity axis is acute.

the stars near the black hole are dealing with very taut, stretched space due to the black hole's infinite utilization/pull of that space and the top of their gravity axis is drawn/held towards the black hole which actually counters the pull of their gravity axis's bottom end and they form an obtuse angle of gravity axis per the black hole's gravity axis.

The acute angle of the outer stars works to make them drawn at the surface [which is our 3D 'space'] towards the black hole's surface position.

their gravities compliment, add to one another.

the obtuse angle of the central stars' gravity axises make their gravity work in opposition to the central black hole's gravity.

their black hole mutual gravity is in opposition/antagonism so the effect is subtractive.

the outer stars have their 'gravity' to the center seemingly increased, & the stars near the black hole have their 'gravity' towards the black hole seemingly decreased,

but it is somewhat more complicated than simple gravity alone.

understand that for the proposed gravity axises i am indicating there is only a single location of intersection with 3D space. all else falls completely outside of the space-time in which we exist.

not sure if this can even be detected, except maybe using some clever innovative method(s).

one could see if the gravity curves around selected stars was not completely symmetric & if that asymmetry fit the/my prescribed speculation. [the orientation was towards or away from the central blackhole of the galaxy.]

and with ego well out of hand i will say this holds up at least as well as 'dark matter' & all the hurdles & hoops 'dark matter' would have to jump through to be correct.

i still hold to my earlier proposition that the Sun's interior has less space than is indicated by its exterior form, but that is very possibly unrealted to the galactic centric effect.

further rattling onward,

the planet's gravities may be mostly due to surface 3D space conditions, because their funnels are more shallow [subject most exclusively to surface conditions], or it could be the draw of the gravity axis bottom could be related to fusion. totally up for grabs. fusion tends to need deep gravity compression so it may be difficult to parse one way or the other.

either of the listed explanations pose problems for exoplanets orbiting the outer stars of the galaxy. My speculation may also hold problems for exoplanets stably orbiting stars in the center of the galaxy.

i have command of the universe! . . . . well, in my own imagination @@

thank goodness i am not as pompous as herds of self patronizing academics,

i am MORE pompous & self patronizing & twice as boring! lol

oh well, i try.

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dpharrellposts · 7 years

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The Wonder in the Word “Open”

A lecture I gave on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College on April 6, 2018…

- "I can't get the jar open." - "When does the store open?" - "The window is open." - "He's an open book." - "She greeted them with open arms." - "My door is always open." - "Keep an open mind." - "Open your heart." - "My eyes were finally opened."

We use the word “open” in ways that range from the prosaic to the profound. But why does the word have such scope? This is one reason for wonder.

Another reason is that we use the word, typically, without further ado, as if its meaning were already understood. But if so, then how is it understood? And is there something here not understood? Or better understood? The difference between a door and an open door may be like the difference between Socrates and Socrates sitting. For only a philosopher, says Aristotle, would care about this difference.1 But the philosopher in all of us, then, can wonder about that difference. We can wonder what it means to say “my door is always open”—even if asking this of a friend, who just said it to you, risks being rude. Or dense. The way we use the word “open” without further thought may make it worth further thought.

Still another reason for wonder comes from the way we define the word “open” in dictionaries—largely through negation. To be open means not to be closed. Or blocked. Or covered. Or fastened. Or sealed. Or buttoned. Or guarded. Or protected. Or folded. Or clenched. Or concealed. Or constipated.2 This may be definition enough for everyday use. But what about those deeper moments of speech, when we talk of eyes being opened? Or arms? Hearts? Minds? Or again the proverbial door, always open to a friend? Here we use the word “open” for a positive condition, a state of being, which any negative definition at best half-comprehends. And to ask about the meaning of “open”, then, is to ask about the meaning of hospitality, generosity, enlightenment, love.

Nor are these the only such states of being. Think of how we say our eyes are open, merely to mean we are awake. But why say this of our eyes, and not our eyelids, which we might call “open” more literally? To use the word for our eyes may be figurative; but it captures how we seem to see through our eyes, as if they were open, to a whole world outside us. To ask about the meaning of “open”, then, is to ask about the meaning of wakefulness, watchfulness, awareness. It is to ask about a way of being that may well be our way of being: the one underneath all the others; the one that explains why we use the word with such scope, and as if it were already understood.

Awareness might also explain our reliance on negation to define the word. For in one sense, a negative sense, being open in awareness means being not ourselves, so far as we are aware of anything else. But negation here seems especially half-comprehending. For beneath our awareness of anything else is an awareness we have of ourselves. And this gives the word “open” a deeper sense of positive scope, as it comprehends self and other at once, and captures something that our times of solitude and solicitude have in common.

In this vein, too, the word “open” might have a home in any community that conceives itself as a community of learning, and believes, without the blush of contradiction, that learning best happens among others, yet only happens in oneself. And if no one else can do your learning for you, it might take a word like “open” to explain why you don’t find yourself alone at this college, but among others around a table, face-to-face. To ask about the meaning of “open”, then, is to ask about the meaning of this. The meaning of us. Just as we can ask, as we look at the cover of the St. John’s viewbook, why the word “open” might be enough to introduce us.

In all these ways, the word “open” gives us much to wonder about. But there is another way, I want to suggest, in which the word gives us just one thing to wonder about. And this is by analogy, borrowing from Aristotle again, to the one thing we can wonder about when we encounter, as if for the first time, figures made of wood come to life; or the sun reverse course one day in the sky; or the diagonal of a square escape measure by any part of its side, no matter how small.3. The wonder, in each case, is how such a thing is possible. Once we learn how, we can give what we encounter a name, like “marionette”, or “solstice”, or “incommensurable.” But these can become words we inherit rather than originate, to discourage understanding just as much as display it, as we use the name for what we don’t yet know as if we do.

The word “open”, I suspect, is just such a name. Behind it, or beneath it, lies a problem, a paradox, to make us wonder how being open is possible. But to wonder how is also unlikely, since we have the word “open” to prove its possibility.

If, for example, I say “I can’t get the jar open”, I will look for a better grip on the lid, not the word. But even here, I can wonder about the word. For why get a better grip on the lid to open the jar? Suppose I decide not to bother with the lid, and simply throw the jar to the ground, breaking it open. Why is this not simply another way of opening the jar? Why say instead that I broke the jar open?

We say this, it seems, in wanting the jar to remain a jar: something opened without being broken. More abstractly put: we want the word “open” to mean that the barrier between the jar’s inside and outside has been removed, without the difference between inside and outside being erased. Or still more abstractly: we want the word “open” to mean that there is continuity, yet at the same time discontinuity, between inside and outside.

But here, then, is the paradox. For how can there be continuity and discontinuity at once? In this case, how is the jar’s inside still inside, and not outside, as soon as the lid is removed? If we leave the jar open, its contents may spoil—as if for nature, even if not for us, a lidless jar has no inside, and can only gain one by being closed. In what sense, then, can I truly open the jar, no matter how great my grip on the lid?

This is one way to wonder how being open is possible. For another way, from a different direction, consider a line from geometry: the parabola. We can distinguish the sides of this line, one convex and one concave, since the parabola is curved. But suppose we go further, and take the convex side to be inside the parabola, and the concave side to be outside. This would treat the curved line as a figure, analogous to the ellipse, only open rather than closed. We might even liken this figure to an lidless, empty jar. But what would justify this interpretation? Why think that the parabola has an inside, distinct from, but open to, an outside? Why aren’t both sides of the parabola outside it, since both lie outside the line of the parabola?

To answer this question, and in defense of the interpretation, we could make the inside of the parabola definite, by completing the analogy to the ellipse. We would then take the parabola to be an infinite ellipse, with one focus infinitely far away. The parabolic line would then be infinite in length, with ends that reach the edge, as it were, of the geometric plane. But in that case, it seems, our parabola will gain a true inside in just the way our jar possessed one: by being closed. For there will be no way into the parabola, or out of it, through its open end, since this now lies infinitely far away. Or to put the paradox more sharply: once we make the line of the parabola infinite, to make the inside of the parabola definite, we will have enclosed the parabola in openness. And by being enclosed, the openness of the parabola is made at once intelligible yet impassable. Its open end will be something we can plainly see, even point to, yet never reach—as if openness had no being but seeming.

The parabola, then, gives us another way to wonder how being open is possible. And while it might seem contrived, in coming from mathematics, it suggests a more general way, and radical way, to wonder how being open is possible. For what if every way of being open were like the parabola? That is, what if every way of being open were really a way of being closed that merely looked open? What if we ourselves were enclosed in openness?

This last question invites us to take a second look at awareness. For awareness, again, might be the openness most our own, comprehending self and other at once. But how? How can I ever be self and other at once? Or to put the paradox in spatial terms: how can I be inside myself and outside myself at once?

To resolve the paradox, we might suppose I am not really outside myself in my awareness of anything else. Here at the podium, for example, I am aware of you—all of you—in the audience, perhaps to the point of anxiety. But it can seem absurd to think my awareness of you carries me into the audience. And the anxiety in this awareness suggests it is not just in body, but also in mind, that I stay right here, at the podium, all alone. To be aware of you, in that case, is not to become you, or even to reach you, but instead—so we might say—to encompass you. Or as we do sometimes say: to include you in my point of view. I would be at the podium, then, as if I were at the center of a circumference that you in the audience were inside rather than outside. And this is why I would not be carried outside myself in my awareness of anything else. For instead, this awareness would bring the outside inside, and make it mine where I stand, at the point of my point of view. And the self, more generally, would not be transcended, but expanded, in the awareness of anything else, allowing self-awareness to contain it, not contradict it.

But if the self is not transcended in the awareness of anything else, then it is hard to see how we are truly open rather than truly closed. For on this account of awareness, it seems that only if the self encloses what lies outside it, can the self be open to what lies outside it. And we ourselves would then be enclosed in openness, just like the parabola, in having selves at all, and as if being open were how being closed looked from within.

The self, then, gives us a final way to wonder how being open is possible. So is it possible? And if it is, then how? Or should we take arguments against its possibility to be not just provocative, but persuasive? Should these arguments deepen our wonder? Or dispel it?

I just gave three such arguments, drawn from a jar, a parabola, and the self. But I now want to turn to a fourth, drawn from a book read in seminar, to clarify a limit, I think, in arguments against openness. So consider this passage, from perhaps the greatest novel written in English:

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects–that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.4

Readers of Middlemarch may remember this passage, and the unhappy marriage that prompts it, between Dorothea Brooke and Edward Causabon. Leaving context aside, we can read the passage as an argument against openness, despite how it begins, against the closedness of moral stupidity. For it is in her emergence from this stupidity, along with her desire, in devotion, to transcend herself, that Dorothea suffers a kind of blindness towards her husband, deeper than any delusions of his greatness. To see him truly, then, is not to see him as a lesser man, without the strength or wisdom to make her wise and strong in turn. It is rather to see him as another self, which makes her a self in turn, no matter how selfless she yearns to be.

The passage thus suggests something false in self-transcendence, even if it were possible. For it can blind one to the selfhood in others that we might say makes for true transcendence in recognition, not renunciation. And an openness of recognition, then, is an openness still enclosed in selfhood.

But now suppose we were ready to accept this argument against openness. What should we make, then, of this later passage in Middlemarch:

For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.5

The subject of this passage, of course, is Causabon himself. And Eliot addresses the reader directly, I think, to persuade us, if not to love him, at least to acknowledge him, and come to know him, then, in his selfhood, just as Dorothea must learn to do. Yet to know Causabon in his selfhood, on Eliot’s account, is to pity him for a self he can never escape. Eliot writes as if there were no way to enjoy, and still be enclosed. For what selfhood is left once we are possessed, fully, by the glory we behold? Or once our consciousness is transformed, rapturously, into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action? Eliot describes enjoyment as if it were an experience not of satisfaction, but of consummation. A liberation from the self in need, intelligibly enough; but where what remains in deliverance, more puzzlingly, is not the self fulfilled, or even a self at all, but only the fulfillment itself, with nothing left to fill.

The puzzle here is again the puzzle of self-transcendence, or the paradox of an openness not enclosed. Yet Eliot describes this as if it were patent rather than puzzling. She writes of enjoyment, in other words, not to make it look exceptional, but to make a man without it look exceptional. And if we are to pity him, and acknowledge him, through pity, in his selfhood, then it seems we must take the self-transcendence he has never known to be a matter of fact, not a matter for doubt. Yet how can it be taken this way, unless it is, somehow, a matter of fact?

This passage thus suggests that the limit in arguments against openness is that they are arguments, finally, against a fact. They suppose that something present, perhaps even ever-present, might not be possible, and then crown this mistake by deeming it impossible. Or to speak more generously of such arguments, if they are arguments, indeed, against a fact: our wonder at the word “open” should not be dispelled by them, but deepened. And one way to acknowledge this, I think, is to recast our question in wonder. For what if this question, now, were not: how is being open possible? But rather: how is being open present?

To clarify what this change of question might mean, consider the following passage, from a book of philosophy by Henri Bergson:

It would greatly astonish a man unaware of the speculations of philosophy if we told him that the object before him, which he sees and touches, exists only in his mind and for his mind or even, more generally, exists only for mind, as Berkeley held. Such a man would always maintain that the object exists independently of the consciousness which perceives it. But, on the other hand, we should astonish him quite as much by telling him that the object is entirely different from that which is perceived in it, that it has neither the color ascribed to it by the eye nor the resistance found in it by the hand. The color, the resistance, are, for him, in the object: they are not states of our mind; they are part and parcel of an existence really independent of our own. For common sense, then, the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it: image it is, but a self-existing image.6

We can read this passage, I think, as an account of how being open is present, in what Bergson calls common sense. For there is nothing in common sense on this account, not even the self, to enclose our openness to the world, and separate the way things seem from the way things are. Instead, the way things seem is the way things are, and claims to the contrary sound incredible. We are open to the world, without being enclosed, as a matter of course.

But even this reading of the passage falls short, I think, of what it suggests about the presence of openness. For there is nothing in Bergson’s account to indicate that common sense is left untouched by the speculations of philosophy because they are wrong. It is more as if they have no power, wrong or right, to inform common sense. And what this suggests, I think, is that openness has a presence that tells us nothing about its possibility. It might well be impossible, for all we know; and yet it would still be present, and could still be described—just as Bergson, a philosopher himself, describes common sense.

Nor is openness, thus understood, merely receptive and unthinking, as if it were immune to reflection by definition. Consider the openness, for example, that we find in a seminar conversation when it is going well. What one participant puts forward, another takes up; and by such turns, the conversation becomes a way, not just to speak, but to think. Outside seminar, we might call this the sharing and examining of our opinions; yet there seems no place for this description inside seminar, and might be called philosophical rather than conversational. For one’s opinion, so-called, is not just held in the conversation, but put forward as a venture; and to call it an “opinion” in reply would be a way of not taking it up.

And by such detours, a seminar might be described, that could never take place. For this description would treat everything said as an expression of what seems to be so, to each participant in turn. But if these expressions are to become a conversation, then what seems so to each, must become so for all. Or to borrow from Bergson, the conversation depends the seminar’s having, or gaining, a common sense of its own, where how things seem is now how they are, and what is said from the chairs is about something on the table. And it is the table, in this sense, that cannot be described, as if its presence were impossible. For even as the conversation empties the chairs to fill the table, for the participants; to any observer, the chairs stay full, the table left bare.

But suppose this were enough to convince us that being open is present, in a sense to be distinguished from its possibility. Still, the question how it is present would not seem clarified by this distinction, but obscured, to the point of paradox. For what could it mean to ask how being open is present, if this is not a question, even implicitly, about its possibility?

To think about what the question might mean, I want to return to Aristotle, for my final passage of the night. This comes from De Anima:

Therefore, since everything is a possible object of thought, mind in order, as Anaxagoras says, to dominate, that is, to know, must be pure from all admixture; for the co-presence of what is alien to its nature is a hindrance and a block: it follows that it too, like the sensitive part, can have no nature of its own, other than that of having a certain capacity. Thus, that in the soul which is called mind (by mind I mean that whereby the soul thinks and judges) is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing. For this reason it cannot reasonably be regarded as blended with the body: if so, it would acquire some quality, e.g. warmth or cold, or even have an organ like the sensitive faculty: as it is, it has none.7

This passage, I think, can be read as an answer to the question: how is being open present? And the answer, to put it simply if paradoxically, is that being open is present as absent. For the mind, on Aristotle’s account, is nothing before it thinks; yet this makes it something when it thinks: the something we call thought. Or that we could more generally call awareness. Or even more generally, openness. And what Aristotle says is reflected, I think, in the prepositions we use for what we might call our achievements in openness. A perception is something, only in being of something. Just as a thought is something, or a sentence to express that thought is something, only in being about something. And openness itself is something, only in being to something. Being open is present, then, only in making present; and in that sense, is present as absent.

This answer can clarify, I think, what it means for the presence of openness not to be a matter of its possibility. For we might say, as if this countered Aristotle, that being open depends on being embodied. The eye, after all, makes sight possible, just as the brain makes thought possible. Still, a thought is not about the brain that makes it possible, but something else. And it is this something else, then, that makes the thought present, while the brain that makes it possible is rendered absent. Similarly, a perception is not of the eye that makes it possible, but something else. And it is this something else, then, that makes the perception present, while the eye that makes it possible is rendered absent. We can grant that the body, then, makes our openness possible. But it is just this that prevents the body from making it present. And we might say that the body, in this sense, makes it possible to be other than body, in a separation—one might even say liberation—of the presence of openness from its possibility. And perhaps this is what Aristotle meant in saying that the mind is not even blended with the body.

But I want to take this answer one step further, and suggest that the presence of openness is indeed liberated from its possibility, by preceding it. In other words, our openness is present, before it is possible, as if its possibility depended on its presence.

But what did I just say? And what could I mean?

To make the suggestion more concrete, let us suppose that I am having a thought right now, about my lecture, as I deliver it. Since this thought is about my lecture, it is my lecture that makes my thought present; and rendered absent, then, is anything about me, rather than my lecture, that makes the thought possible. But since the thought is also mine, we could say that its presence is mine, and my absence from it in turn. In other words, since the thought is mine and no one else’s, the lecture makes the thought present to me and no one else. But this implies the same about what, in me, makes the thought possible: it is absent to me and to no one else. To everyone else I am present in what I think, as the source of what I think; and this presence for everyone else is the other side of its absence for me and me alone. If I am present in my thought to myself, it is only through the eyes of others. And in this sense, at least, the presence of my thought would precede its possibility, in just the way my own eyes on my thought, so to speak, precede the eyes of others.

But to make this suggestion still more concrete, I want to propose a name for what I have just tried to describe: nakedness. And we might say that being naked is the other side of being open, just as my presence to others in openness is the other side of my absence to myself. Nakedness even lurks in the open jar we started with. For if this jar could know it was open, the absence of its lid would be present to it, perhaps, in its feeling exposed, and no longer sure that its inside was inside rather than outside.

And a true feeling of exposure involves a similar sense of dislocation. For example, why is it possible for me to feel exposed, as I stand behind this podium? The dislocation in this feeling, I think, could be put like this: I risk feeling exposed, behind this podium, because I know this is where I stand, only through you. Left to myself, so to speak, I would say that I am always where I am. That is, my place always moves with me, leaving me with no place to stand, again left to myself. In this solitary sense, it is not I who have a place behind the podium, but the podium that has a place in front of me. And the only way I might make a place for myself behind it, is to stop moving and take my stand; though again, I will only know I have taken it through you, in having a chosen a place to stand that can be recognized by you. And in having taken my stand, without yet knowing how I stand, in this sense, to you, I am left exposed.

In a way, I am like a jar just opened, waiting to know if my inside will survive outside. Or to bring this predicament of displacement closer to our own form of openness, we could say that when we open our eyes and see a whole world outside us, the price we pay is not to see where we are inside it, which forces us to make, not find, that place; or to stop and take our stand. And perhaps the deepest way we take this stand is in our selfhood, which on the suggestion I am pursuing now, is not something we have, or something we find, but something that again we make, and have to make, to make a home in the world when we are otherwise homeless in openness. Or to put this in terms of our nakedness in openness, it is as if we were enclothed, not enclosed, by our selfhood. And in this sense, too, I think we could say our openness is present before it is possible, as we try to make its possibility present to ourselves, and give our openness a place, even a shape, we can call our own.

But I want to take one last approach to this suggestion, by returning to the examples of wonder I borrowed from Aristotle, near the beginning of my lecture. For if it were possible for figures made of wood to come to life, just like that; or for the sun to reverse course one day in the sky, just like that; or for the diagonal of a square to escape measure by any part of its side, just like that; then I think these would not be causes of wonder, but objects of perception. They are causes of wonder, perhaps, because what is present, in wonder, is not possible just like that. But it becomes possible, we might say, once we find a place in the world for it. Yet there might be more than one such place. For the animate made from the inanimate, “marionette” would be the name of one such place; but “puppet” would be the name of another; and perhaps “cartoon” the name of still another. For the reversal of the sun in the sky, we find one place in Ptolemy, but another in Copernicus. Just as we find one place for the incommensurable in Euclid, but another in Dedekind. This gives us a way of understanding why the word “open” might be enough to introduce us, where we treat the books we read not as if they formed a march through history, but as if each were a place in turn, where a mind might take its stand, and help a soul become a self.

I think this is also suggests a final reason, and perhaps an obvious reason, why there is wonder in the word “open”. For “open” might be just another word for wonder.

See Metaphysics 1004b1.↩

See, for example, the Merriam Webster entry for “open”.↩

See Metaphysics 983a12.↩

Eliot, George, Middlemarch, Chap. 21.↩

Middlemarch, Chap. 29.↩

Bergson, Henri, Matter and Memory, trans. Paul and Palmer (Zone Books, 1991) p. 10.↩

Aristotle, De Anima, trans. J. A. Smith, 429a18-27.↩

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tuthillscopes-blog · 7 years

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Genius by numbers: why Hollywood maths movies don't add up

check it out @ https://tuthillscopes.com/genius-by-numbers-why-hollywood-maths-movies-dont-add-up/

Genius by numbers: why Hollywood maths movies don't add up

From The Beautiful Mind towards the Theory of all things anf the husband Who Understood Infinity, Hollywood loves a math wizzard. Why cant it get past the fevered prodigy scribbling equations on home windows?

In the Tina Fey sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, wealthy Manhattanite Jacqueline Vorhees wails to her assistant that they cant manage to get divorced. Despite the fact that shed get $1m for each year of her marriage.

I spend 100 grand per month. Ill be broke in ten years, she wails. No, thats wrong, counters Kimmy (Ellie Kemper), who scribbles some sums having a marker on Mrs Vorheess window. So $100,000 occasions 12 several weeks. Thats $1.2m annually. Divide that into $12m, you will find, youd be broke in ten years. However if you simply invest a lot of it, presuming a 7% rate of return, while using compound interest formula, your hard earned money would almost double.

Kimmy turns round triumphantly: Mrs Voorhees, I mathed, and you may get divorced! Mrs Vorhees eyes Kimmy narrowly. Individuals aren’t, she complains, erasable markers. What she doesnt mention is the fact that math isnt a verb. Not.

The scene is, amongst other things, Feys satire from the Hollywood cliche of genius squiggling on glass. In A Beautiful Mind (2001), for example, Russell Crowe, playing troubled maths star John Forbes Nash Jr, writes formulae on his dorm window. This scene is echoed in The Social Network (2010), where Andrew Garfield sets the equations for Facebooks business design on the Harvard window while Jesse Eisenbergs Mark Zuckerberg looks on. Within the opening scene of excellent Will Hunting (1997), janitor prodigy Matt Damon writes equations on the bathroom mirror.

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So why do a lot of Hollywood maths whizzes forego paper? Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin explains. Depicting a math wizzard scribbling formulas on the piece of paper is much more accurate, however it certainly doesnt convey the look of the person amorously involved with mathematics, along with seeing someone write individuals formulas in steam on the mirror or perhaps in wax on the window, neither is it as being cinematographically dramatic.

Good point. Whenever we see a Beautiful Mind and appear with the window at our Russ, Hollywoods most built math wizzard (counterexamples on postcards, please show your workings), we pass beyond incomprehensive equations and convince ourselves were seeing Genius at the office. Even when, as some critics have complained uncharitably, Russs pi glyphs, greater-than and fewer-than symbols and the like dont seem sensible.

But theres one other way maths movies can confound the Monotony Equation, namely by departing a black hole in which the maths ought to be. The Man Who Knew Infinity, the brand new film starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons concerning the great Indian math wizzard Srinivasa Ramanujan, is intriguing in this way. Although we have seen Ramanujan doing maths, mostly the show has an interest in other activities how he falls deeply in love with his wife, the discomfort of separation as he travels from Madras to review at Cambridge, the racism he suffers in England and, most stirringly, the narrative arc from lowly clerk to globally recognised math wizzard.

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Hollywoods most built mathematician Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. Photograph: Universal Studios

That said, the film has its charming moments. When Hardy visits Ramanujan in a nursing home, he complains about the boring number of the cab that brought him there. Ramanujan begs to differ: 1,729 is the smallest that is expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways. Today 1,729 is known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number. How does that work, you may be wondering? Like this: 1729 = 13 + 123 = 93 + 103.

Ramanujans mentor GH Hardy (Irons) is an atheist and rationalist, exasperated that this Indian prodigy cannot produce proofs for his work and, worse, is doubtful that proofs can explain the inexplicable. You wanted to know how I get my ideas, says Ramanujan. God speaks to me. But while the film may sketch two different mathematical philosophies, we leave the cinema with a warm glow that comes from anything but hard thinking.

If you want to learn some more about Ramanujans contribution to mathematics, rent High School Musical. Freeze-frame it at the moment brainy Gabriella Montez challenges her teacher. On the board are two of the equations of the inverse of the constant pi (1/) that Ramanujan offered in his first paper published in England. Shouldnt the second equation read 16 over pi? asks Gabriella. Of course it should.

Cinema often struggles with dramatising difficult ideas, particularly if they are abstract. One way of overcoming that problem is by metaphorical explanation. For instance, in Nicholas Roegs Insignificance (1985), a Marilyn Monroe-like character demonstrates relativity using toy trains and flashing lights. In The Theory of Everything, Jane Hawking uses a pea and a potato to explain the difference between quantum theory and general relativity, while her husbands friends explain Hawking Radiation with beers and crisps.

Movie explanations of difficult stuff, though, may obscure rather than enlighten. Whats more, some directors know this and have fun pointing out the shortcomings of their medium and those of their audiences. In Adam McKays The Big Short (2016), for example, Margot Robbie sits inside a tub sipping champagne and describing how sub-prime loans work. Her explanation is doubtless coherent, however when Im searching in a beautiful lady inside a bubble bath, I am not considering credit default swaps. So sue me. Later within the film, chef Anthony Bourdain chops fish in the kitchen while describing how collateralised debt obligations work. Finally, Selena Gomez plays roulette as one example of the thought of gambling on other bands gambles.

Each scene works as a parody of explanation. They are members of a movie that mocks you, you poor jerk, as well as your intellectual aspirations. You are not ever likely to know how difficult stuff works from watching movies, however much youd prefer to.

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Sometimes, though, cinema can provide a genuine understanding of the intellectual process. In Agora (2009), Rachel Weisz as ancient philosopher Hypatia does a test on the shipped to test relative motion. If, she hypothesises, you drop huge sack in the mast as the ship is continuing to move forward, it’ll fall around the deck several ft behind the mast. The sack is dropped and falls much nearer to the mast than she predicted. Hypatia claps her hands in delight. However, you were wrong! states the ships captain. Yes, but it’s definitive proof! The sack behaves as though the boat were stationary.

What am i saying?

I do not know. However the identical principle could be relevant to our planet. It may be getting around the sun’s rays without us realising.

Hypatia, in other words, infers an innovative heliocentric cosmology from her falsified hypothesis. The show thus generously provides for us what we should are effectively denied in Good Will Hunting or perhaps a Beautiful Mind the news about how someone clever is considering an issue. Furthermore, its an antidote to Hollywoods vision of genius. It shows that getting stuff wrong reaches least as vital within the story of human intellectual progress to be right constantly.

Maths is frequently reduced to simply a MacGuffin. In Rushmore (1998), for example, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) is studying the newspaper while his teacher informs his class that around the blackboard may be the hardest geometry equation on the planet. What credits would anybody solving it get, asks one student. Well, thinking about Ive never witnessed anybody understand it properly, including my mentor Dr Leaky at Durch, I suppose if anybody here can solve this problem, Id ensure that none individuals have to spread out another math book again throughout your lives.

Thus enticed, Fischer folds his paper and would go to the blackboard, and squiggles his solution while nonchalantly sipping espresso. The show at this time is not to declare but Fischers genius. Will we really believe Jason Schwartzmann can compute the region of the ellipse? Sure. Whatever.

Genius squiggling can there be once more just to assist Hollywood tell the sentimental story it never tires of: namely the storyline of somebody usually borderline demented by definition insufficiently recognised sticking it towards the establishment.

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Genius squiggling Rushmore

None of this should suggest we cant learn maths from movies. In Tina Feys Mean Girls (2004), for example, Lindsay Lohan plays a finalist in the Illinois high school mathletes state championship. Will her Northern Coast High team place it to individuals prep school toffs opposite? Heres the initial question: Two times the bigger of two figures is three greater than five occasions the smaller sized, and the sum of the four occasions the bigger and three occasions the smaller sized is 71. Do you know the figures? First got it yet? 14 and 5. Within the finish, Lohans team end up being the new condition champs because she wins the sudden dying tie-break. Exactly what does the scene prove? That individuals individuals who thought She no longer can do maths should certainly talk to her.

Possibly probably the most resonant maths scene in Hollywood cinema, though, comes in an exceedingly old comedy. Within the Abbott and Costello movie Within the Navy (1941), Lou is really a ships prepare. Hes baked 28 doughnuts, which he reckons is just enough to give 13 to each of his seven officers. But seven adopts 28 four occasions, objects Lous straight man. Not too, states Lou, who procedes to prove it around the blackboard inside a masterclass of cheating and illusion. The scene demonstrates an over-all truth, namely that whenever Hollywood does maths, it doesnt always accumulate.

The Man Who Knew Infinity is released on 8 April.

Find out more: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/06/mathematics-movies-the-man-who-knew-infinity

#Culture #Film #Mathematics #Rushmore #Russell Crowe #Science #The Big Short #The Man Who Knew Infinity #Tina Fey

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