Chemistry: family portraits

[Humberto Torofuerte]

The natural log of minus one is pi (3.141592 etc.) multiplied by i, the
square root of minus one. Remarkable, isn't it? You take the log of minus
one, and you get its square root multiplied by pi. Aside from the sheer
beauty of mathematics, this illustrates that there was something there all
along, right in front of one's eyes so to speak, which people chose not to
see. First they pretended negative numbers didn't exist. Then they pretended
that imaginary numbers, ones involving the square root of minus one, didn't
exist, or were absurd, or were meaningless. Space debris, as it were.

Now that is exactly how it is today when it comes to the spiritual world,
the aliens, the things that go bump in the night, the hyper-dimensional
entities that intersect our space-time, cases of coincidence, telepathy,
teleportation. We pretend they are not there, or if there, they are
meaningless or absurd, or even if they are real, well, so what, they are
useless. But any engineer knows how useful i—or j, as electrical engineers
call the square root of minus one—really is. The so-called imaginary
numbers, or complex numbers (those numbers having both a real and an
imaginary part), are some of the most useful in all of mathematics...but the
simple point I am making is that spiritual or hyper-dimensional phenomena
are imaginary. But they are imaginary in the same way imaginary numbers are
imaginary. They may be imaginary, but they are very real, in some sense of
physical reality. They are built into the fabric of reality, and only a fool
denies reality.

On 10/31/06, pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> a current advocate of replacing the spiritual
> dimension that the Enlightenment removed:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber
>
>
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________________________________
> Get your email and see which of your friends are online - Right on the New
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