Growing up I always wanted to be one of those kids who goes to
college when they are 12 and then go on to be physicists and discover
the inner workings of the universe before the age of twenty. I did
not achieve those lofty goals. I did get some books on physics which
I didn't understand and I would lie to people who didn't know much
about that kind of thing to make myself seem smarter than I was. One
thing I did which was particularly lame was imagine the order of the
universe like a completely ad hoc cosmologist and then draw pictures
and math equations along with cryptic notes to create the illusion of
deeply mystical and esoteric dabbling into the scientific occult.
They were just props and had no relevance to reality or hidden
workings of the world. I want to be clear that this was not when I
was a ten year old with dreams bigger than my opportunities for
learning. This was when I was 16 and definitely should have known
better. I decided that based on some pictures I saw in the Scientific
American in an article I didn't read that the universe was shaped
like a torus and there was a huge glob of dark matter at its center
which bent all light back in on itself. I also imagined that the dark
matter created the motive force for all light in the universe. I drew
a picture of a torus in LaserCad and looked up the generating
equations and put them in there for good measure. I included a few
cryptic notes and some hand drawn call outs to make it look official
and like it was the product of tortured and misunderstood genius.
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| This is the shape of the universe for those of you who will not check. |
I
could have very easily checked any of my premises but preferred to
nurse my ego in my wholly fantasy world. The more embarrassing thing
about it was that I would show people, mainly girls, these pages in
my notebook and then give them a much too convoluted explanation and
almost always they would be impressed with how smart I was and I
liked that more then actually getting smarter. I remember one not
where I wrote something close to this, “I have made an important
discovery called the basic increase. . .”
Before I finish writing what I wrote back then I need to tell you
that my ego is still so tied up in being smart that even writing
about my past pretentious mistakes is a struggle. I have been
thinking of ways to make it not seem so desperately lame but there is
no way – onward.
Back to what I wrote – After I named my invention in a hand drawn
note I wrote out this equation y=x2 and then drew a graph
of that equation and made some random notes about how important this
discovery was in the understanding of the universe.
Even if you are not familiar with basic algebra or grade school
cosmology it should not be hard to see I had invented nothing. That
equation was named a square function probably a couple of thousand
years before I was born. Good work genius.
