04-11-2019, 10:09 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-11-2019, 10:42 PM by Marcus DuBois.)
Five ingots sat on the desk before him. Each one seemed identical. To any quark tunneling microscopic, they were. Each atom of iron sat equidistant from the other in a perfect 3 dimensional lattice structure.
And yet, a childish smile on his face, he couldn't help repeatedly channeling a single weave of all the powers at each one of them and seeing them resonate in different ways. One for each flavor: earth, fire, water, air and spirit.
A sixth sat off to the side. It had been divided into sections and the process repeated. For this one, that single flow of pure Force produced different resonances in each part: one section was for air, another for water, and so on.
It had taken days- or evenings, rather. He found he forgot to eat, he had become so engrossed in what he was doing.
Of course he cataloged it all in his app, though a secured area of the cloud. He'd not let just anyone see this. Not yet. Especially not until he was the master of it all.
For what he envisioned, though, he needed more. In and of itself, each ingot didn't do anything but resonate. Twitching frog legs in response to an electrical current. Oohs and ahhs might fill the display room....but it wasn't useful. Not at all.
He remembered as a child finding an old play-dough press. It had been in someone's garage. He studied it, saw how the raw dough could be fed in and something structured come out. The small containers of colored dough were filled with solid rocks, now. He'd never gotten to try it.
But that's what he wanted. An object that, when fed the Force, produced a specific braid, to borrow a term from Knot theory, of multiple flavors of the power.
The problem was, the metal only resonated. It didn't do anything with that flavor of power. It didn't pluck it out of the mass and shape it as the press supposedly did with dough.
After a day or two, he took a break. He was in the weeds, with this. Too close. He needed to step back.
One of his practices when he hit a wall was to compose a letter to an imaginary friend describing his problem in detail. He usually found that just defining the issue and all the avenues and dead ends he had taken usually helped him see the answer.
He had paused while writing his letter, remember how similar it was to talk to Malik so long ago- long before he had a name- about his pain and anger, his frustration and deep loneliness. Just talking to him seemed to help. Malik had become more real until Marcus knew his answer as soon as he had composed his dilemma. It became a two way conversation.
It was a comfort. As he described his problem, he went over each of the elements of his equations. The first one was the 'twistyness'. The Dowker notation of each knot made up a Jones polynomial. It described each thread of each flavor of the power and how it wound about in 3-d space.
The 2nd element in the matrix was the 'fractal dimension' expressed as a line intergral, describing the amount of Force (its maginitude or density) of each thread at any given point t. When pressed by whomever was on the other end, he explained more clearly. How much of the Force was he using for each thread? Some threads might be thin and weak, others thick and strong. This captured that.
Finally, the 3rd element in the matrix of the Tau was the parameterized oscillating function of each thread, identifying what flavor of the Force it was.
And something funny happened as he explained it to his imaginary friend. The first and third terms of the matrix were fine. How a thread was shaped and what kind of thread it was was unchangeable. It couldn't change.
And you'd think so was its magnitude. But there was an interesting aspect to integrals many missed, for which line integrals were merely a subset. Even though they might describe physical quantities like area or how strong something was, they weren't bound by normal human assumption.
A person measuring the area of a circle or square will always expect their result to be a positive number. A 2 by 2 square will have an area of 4. An area with a negative number makes absolutely no sense. Same with maginitude or work, defined as force to change vector velocity. There's zero work and then greater than zero work. Negative work or magnitude makes no physical sense.
But in mathematics, divorced from reality as it is, such assumptions have no real basis. And thus signed areas or magnitudes of work (or forces) can exist and can be negative.
He stopped, stunned. Could that be it? Could it be so simple? If his 2nd term was negative and impressed in the iron, would it create a vacuum- a negative pressure section creating a 'suction' to draw the actual thread in?
He almost stopped breathing. It was elegant. He envisioned a play-dough press where a vacuum sucked in the dough. But in this case, each ingot would suck in the thread or color it wanted.
He looked at the clock. It was past 11 and tomorrow would come quickly.
But he couldn't stop. At least with one of them. Not if he was this close.
He closed his eyes and seized the Force.
And yet, a childish smile on his face, he couldn't help repeatedly channeling a single weave of all the powers at each one of them and seeing them resonate in different ways. One for each flavor: earth, fire, water, air and spirit.
A sixth sat off to the side. It had been divided into sections and the process repeated. For this one, that single flow of pure Force produced different resonances in each part: one section was for air, another for water, and so on.
It had taken days- or evenings, rather. He found he forgot to eat, he had become so engrossed in what he was doing.
Of course he cataloged it all in his app, though a secured area of the cloud. He'd not let just anyone see this. Not yet. Especially not until he was the master of it all.
For what he envisioned, though, he needed more. In and of itself, each ingot didn't do anything but resonate. Twitching frog legs in response to an electrical current. Oohs and ahhs might fill the display room....but it wasn't useful. Not at all.
He remembered as a child finding an old play-dough press. It had been in someone's garage. He studied it, saw how the raw dough could be fed in and something structured come out. The small containers of colored dough were filled with solid rocks, now. He'd never gotten to try it.
But that's what he wanted. An object that, when fed the Force, produced a specific braid, to borrow a term from Knot theory, of multiple flavors of the power.
The problem was, the metal only resonated. It didn't do anything with that flavor of power. It didn't pluck it out of the mass and shape it as the press supposedly did with dough.
After a day or two, he took a break. He was in the weeds, with this. Too close. He needed to step back.
One of his practices when he hit a wall was to compose a letter to an imaginary friend describing his problem in detail. He usually found that just defining the issue and all the avenues and dead ends he had taken usually helped him see the answer.
He had paused while writing his letter, remember how similar it was to talk to Malik so long ago- long before he had a name- about his pain and anger, his frustration and deep loneliness. Just talking to him seemed to help. Malik had become more real until Marcus knew his answer as soon as he had composed his dilemma. It became a two way conversation.
It was a comfort. As he described his problem, he went over each of the elements of his equations. The first one was the 'twistyness'. The Dowker notation of each knot made up a Jones polynomial. It described each thread of each flavor of the power and how it wound about in 3-d space.
The 2nd element in the matrix was the 'fractal dimension' expressed as a line intergral, describing the amount of Force (its maginitude or density) of each thread at any given point t. When pressed by whomever was on the other end, he explained more clearly. How much of the Force was he using for each thread? Some threads might be thin and weak, others thick and strong. This captured that.
Finally, the 3rd element in the matrix of the Tau was the parameterized oscillating function of each thread, identifying what flavor of the Force it was.
And something funny happened as he explained it to his imaginary friend. The first and third terms of the matrix were fine. How a thread was shaped and what kind of thread it was was unchangeable. It couldn't change.
And you'd think so was its magnitude. But there was an interesting aspect to integrals many missed, for which line integrals were merely a subset. Even though they might describe physical quantities like area or how strong something was, they weren't bound by normal human assumption.
A person measuring the area of a circle or square will always expect their result to be a positive number. A 2 by 2 square will have an area of 4. An area with a negative number makes absolutely no sense. Same with maginitude or work, defined as force to change vector velocity. There's zero work and then greater than zero work. Negative work or magnitude makes no physical sense.
But in mathematics, divorced from reality as it is, such assumptions have no real basis. And thus signed areas or magnitudes of work (or forces) can exist and can be negative.
He stopped, stunned. Could that be it? Could it be so simple? If his 2nd term was negative and impressed in the iron, would it create a vacuum- a negative pressure section creating a 'suction' to draw the actual thread in?
He almost stopped breathing. It was elegant. He envisioned a play-dough press where a vacuum sucked in the dough. But in this case, each ingot would suck in the thread or color it wanted.
He looked at the clock. It was past 11 and tomorrow would come quickly.
But he couldn't stop. At least with one of them. Not if he was this close.
He closed his eyes and seized the Force.