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by PAM
"Mathematical knowledge is unlike any other knowledge. Its truths are objective, necessary and timeless."- Prof. Edward Frenkel (UC Berkeley)
In the article, "Is the universe a simulation?"
The NY Times Sunday Review
What an interesting article. I still subscribe to Brian May's personal rule as a Scientist though, that we can only hope to understand what is in front of us. Beyond it, is a Truth that our abilities and logic as human beings and the capacity of the highly sophisticated tools that we have developed to enhance our abilities, such as Science and Technology, can never match for absolute understanding. Therefore, scientists must stop at a certain boundary, and dare not cross it. And yet, as Christians, we embrace that Truth with all our being, that Truth that is God, that is of God.
But going back to Math... just a few days back, I sat to listen to a lecture by one of our Math professors in the UST Faculty of Engineering, one of the activities in the celebration of our "Engineering Week". He lectured about Quaternions, which are a number system that extends complex numbers so they can be analyzed the same way we do matrices in linear algebra. Even when our colleague tried to make the lecture sound "light" and not too "stressful" for the applied science audience (myself included), somehow the questions that he extracted were leaning towards application rather than the theoretical aspects of Quaternions. And, we gathered that Quaternions have vast applications in animation and game development... to the delight of our Computer Science comrades, quite naturally! :)
Apparently, the application of Quaternions is in 3D computer images, and make possible the quick transition of a thousand frames, one after another, that makes animation, specifically in computer games, more realistic in simulating real movement. I know, very cool. And yet, that is still a very small thing compared with simulating the Universe... at least, from the context of limited human understanding. At the end of the series of a variety of lectures was a lecture on Liturgy by our Regent... the best way, I think, to put all our wonderful S&T stuff in their right places.
Yeah, it was a great (geeky) day - the Catholic University way!
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