Friday, July 2, 2010

If I Only Had A Brane...

Okay... I saw this word, "brane", and wondered what it meant.

Eventually, my searching lead me here.

Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of explaining stuff, so when I read this:

In string theory, D-branes are a class of extended objects upon which open strings can end with Dirichlet boundary conditions, after which they are named. D-branes were discovered by Dai, Leigh and Polchinski, and independently by Horava in 1989. In 1995, Polchinski identified D-branes with black p-brane solutions of supergravity, a discovery that triggered the Second Superstring Revolution and led to both holographic and M-theory dualities.

I immediately got the feeling that sometime in the near future, this would make perfect sense to the average citizen. Sort of how the equation "x + 2 = 8" can be simplified into first-grade math as "+2=8".

But then, the average citizen doesn't even know how to define zero-, one-, and two-dimensional space. (Dot, line, polygon)

And I must admit... this looks pretty darn cool. What if our brain (HA! no pun intended) worked like this?

I wonder how many surfaces this has?

Is this your brain after drinking from a Klein bottle?

Or perhaps the instant explosion from an atomic bomb? Or maybe the instance of the Big Bang?

Or maybe God's bubble gum right after it popped?

Me, I just wonder... if you can extrapolate a circle, line, point, and various other conic sections from a cone (as well as a triangle!), what sort of 4-D shape can a cone be extrapolated from?

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