but why ME?
This is my story, about how I got to be, as someone I know pointed out with all good intent, I suppose, a rebel, and in danger of "hellfire", if what I read into her statement was true:
I would never even have bothered with solving The Goldbach Conjecture or even embarking on the book "COUNT1NG NUMB3R5" but for the brush-in I had with my physics teacher at a high school I was at.Now the guy loved God, or loved talking about Him, which is all good and fine...each to his own poison and all that... but then, he loved doing it when he should have been telling us about what we needed to do to pass the upcoming examinations which would have been in less than a year.
I really should have been warned by his encouraging words, which made me wish I had listened to my other Science teacher and stuck to literature and not ventured into the more "practical" subjects like Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry:- He told the forty-odd hopefuls who gathered in front of him that we were committing "suicide" when we all gathered in front of him for registration for his Physics class.
Many decided to drop the subject and took up the option of Biology instead, but I had no such choice. I wanted to find out for myself what I could REALLY do, and being told I can never do something practical by somebody else steeled my resolve to do so, and when this other teacher told us - me included- that, based on a cursory examination we were not cut out for the rigours of Advanced Level Physics I just could not back down.
But that was not even the half of it. My run in with the guy came the day we were doing optics, and he asked for a definition of "diffraction".
This is basically what diffraction is all about. But that was not the problem.
We were not talking about water here, but about light, which is a whole different ball game... or "wave form"...so to speak.
Light is supposed to, according to the popular theory, move forward as well as up and down in transverse "waves" kind of like how stationary water does, which when you try to picture it does not really make any sense.
Which is what I had in mind when I raised my hand to supply a definition of how it is diffracted.
I said it was the apparent bending of light when it went through an aperture whose "size" is about the same as the presumed wavelength of light... almost in so many words. He was not amused. He wanted precision. He wanted me to tell him that there was no "apparent " about it
but that light did bend.
I did as he asked, and felt cheap, because even then I intuited that the wrong was not with me, but with the whole set-up itself, and I wanted to prove it all to myself, because it made no sense to just accept something so I could pass while at the same time inwardly rejecting it.
The "coloured" picture shows a bit of what light is supposed to do when it comes to a diffraction grating whose width is the same as its "wavelength"
Anyway, I also tried to work out my teacher's "beliefs" and why he was so pessimistic about his work, for which he got paid, so much so that he tried to put God into it, and when I later found out that another physicist had taken a radically different approach to the God story; by challenging any clergyman to show him the evidence from The Bible that "proved" the age of the Earth, I wondered what physics lecturers and teachers were high on!
So, one can begin to see where my interest in finding out the truth was fostered.
I am not a believer, nor do I have faith, but I suppose that, when anything is looked at objectively, then any theory ought to be able to stand to the test without any person's opinion.
So, for me, it is a question of questioning faith!
COUNT1NG NUMB3R5;the Upcoming book that will rock the world!!!!
