August
27, 2017 Sunday
Bedtime
Story
Mon Ami's Gardener Analogy
It
may sound strange, but fascinatingly enough, in this paper concerning truth,
proof and logic Tarski takes us into linguistics.
When
you study something out of interest, you will realize that one cannot merely
stick to one’s chosen subject of liking.
There
is this strange irony in the fact that you will be forced to venture into other
subjects if you really love your subject deeply.
There
is this example often given by mon ami.
Consider
for instance a gardener.
You
might not even remotely associate a gardener with science, least of all
theoretical sciences.
But
if a gardener is curious enough and loves to read and takes not just a cosmetic
interest in his endeavor, he is bound to end up ultimately studying molecular
and cellular biology and evolutionary biology to come to terms with the origins
of the stuff he works with everyday.
Once
you have interest in cells and molecules, you are bound to end up studying
astrophysics.
And
if astrophysics will grip and fascinate your mind, you are bound to get tangled
up with particle physics.
This
might be a good place to digress from the paper of Tarski and talk about the ouraborus,
Martin Rees and his book “Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the
Universe” (1999).
I
shall quote a very interesting excerpt from this book as it directly validates
the point that mon ami makes.
I
begin quoting the book from here:
“Large
Numbers and Diverse Scales:
We
are each made up of between 1028 and 1029 atoms.
This
‘human scale’ is, in a numerical sense, poised midway between the masses of
atoms and stars.
It
would take roughly as many human bodies to make up the mass of the Sun as there
as atoms in each of us.
But
our Sun is just an ordinary star in the galaxy that contains hundred billion
stars altogether.
There
are at least as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in
the galaxy.
More
than 1078 atoms lie within range of our telescope.
Living
organisms are configured into layer upon layer of complex structure.
Atoms
are assembled into complex molecules; they react, via complex pathways in every
cell, and indirectly lead to the entire interconnected structure that makes up
a tree, an insect or a human.
We
straddle the cosmos and the microworld – intermediate in size between the Sun,
at a billion meters in diameter, and a molecule at a billionth of a meter.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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