Time and change.

The idea of time seems almost trivial. When you think, "what time is it?" You simply look at a watch and there you have it. Your question is answered instantaneously via watch or, in our technologically advancing society, by phone. Similarly, the idea of passage of time is dealt with as a matter of course. It takes 3 hours to drive there, or 15 minutes until my lunch break. Time is a thing that has been obscured by a veil of the ordinary.

If we ask more penetrating questions about time we begin to see where our common notion of time breaks down. The most common measure of time is a second. One second for this, ten seconds for that 3600 seconds in an hour. The second, however, is not the smallest measure of time. There are milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds,....., all the way down. So what is the smallest unit of time? If we can make smaller and smaller partitions of a second to no end, is there no smallest unit of time?

Now lets talk about change. What is change. Certainly time and change must be interrelated in some way. If there is no time, how do we measure change? If things don't change, is there time?

Calculus for Christmas.

I am toying with writing a series of blog posts that deal with calculus over the holiday break. I have been mulling over a certain phrase that crops up whenever I tell people what it is I do. Most people have a default response to anything regarding mathematics: "I don't understand math." This has bothered me for sometime; mostly because I used to be the one saying it.

The posts would not be lectures on calculus, or attempts at explaining the dense symbolic language involved in describing calculus. Instead, I would like to attempt to explain why calculus is really an easy set of concepts to understand and why it is so hard to master.

Blog reopening.

I am reopening this thing for a class project.