[Search for users] [Overall Top Noters] [List of all Conferences] [Download this site]

Conference hydra::dejavu

Title:	Psychic Phenomena
Notice:	Please read note 1.0-1.* before writing
Moderator:	JARETH::PAINTER

Created:	Wed Jan 22 1986
Last Modified:	Tue May 27 1997
Last Successful Update:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:	2143
Total number of notes:	41773

265.0. "Not ready to read this book" by SURPLS::GOLDBERG (Ed Goldberg) Thu Dec 18 1986 16:07

    After reading this conference and not finding an appropriate place
    for this, I guess (darn!) I'll just have to open a new topic.
    I don't know how to explain the following, except by saying that my
    memory is fallible.  That could cover any number of reasonable
    alternatives, but none would satisfy me (though someone else may
    use that without my feeling hurt).
    
    When I was in college, majoring in engineering, I used to have some
    lengthy go-nowhere talks with friends about physics and relativity
    and such.  Whatever the mood brought up.  One friend, upon graduation,
    gave me a book titled "Relativity" by Albert Einstein.  It is inscribed
    by that friend.  [To add a little spice, that friend had done some
    Casta�eda reading.]  Two or three days after receiving the book,
    I tried to start to read it.  Everything was fine, until I reached
    the bottom of page 2.  A few lines before the bottom of that page
    was a simple tensor equation.  The text went on from there explaining
    the continuance of the argument using that equation.  As I have
    had no training at all with tensors, I decided to give the book
    a rest a while, till I found the time to learn tensors.

    I picked up the book again a few months later, and again decided
    the same.
    
    So far, I have learned nothing of tensor mathematics.  But I picked
    up the book about 18 months ago, and looked at page 2, and found
    just text, no tensor equation!  I was very surprised.  I looked
    through the first 50 pages.  No tensors.  I looked through my entire
    collection of books for anything that would have a tensor equation,
    and found nothing.  [I don't get rid of books.  I still have a bunch
    of college texts that are useless to anyone given their age.]  I've
    since started reading the book, and, like it says on the cover,
    you need no more than high school algebra (for the mathematics)
    to read this book.  It is very simple, and very educational.  No
    tensors.  I keep re-reading the first 50 pages, as I ponder the
    subject ad infinitum, and must recover forgotton ground as time
    goes by.  Still no tensors.
    
    What happened to the book?  Or to my memory (over 8+ years)?
    I've imagined every permutation of "rational" explanation I can
    think of, with nothing that sounds even close, and nothing which
    doesn't bring up more questions than it answers.
    
    Any "bookish" replies out there?

T.R	Title	User	Personal Name	Date	Lines
265.1	more	SURPLS::GOLDBERG	Ed Goldberg	`Thu Dec 18 1986 16:55`	9
	Feelings about .0: While in college, a professor gave out a suggested reading list, not to be looked at until 5 years after graduation - so we were experienced enough in professional and worldly matters to absorb more of the weight of the books. In this light, the base note describes what seems like an unreadiness for reading the book, as perceived by the book. ??
265.2	RE 265.1	EDEN::KLAES	Looking for nuclear wessels.	`Thu Dec 18 1986 17:04`	5
	Please correct me if you mean something else, but how does a BOOK know when someone is ready to understand its contents or not? Larry
265.3	Got me.	SURPLS::GOLDBERG	Ed Goldberg	`Thu Dec 18 1986 17:15`	8
	re: .2 > Please correct me if you mean something else, but how does a >BOOK know when someone is ready to understand its contents or not? I don't know. I'm just trying to spur some discussion any way I can because I can't think of anything to adequately explain this. Maybe I just have another inexplicable thing in my life that I just have to live with.
265.4	I'll check my frame of reference	HUDSON::STANLEY	Sugar Magnolia	`Fri Dec 19 1986 08:50`	8
	I also have a book entitled "Relativity" by Albert Einstein. I went through a very similar scenario reading to the point of the tensor equation and the putting the book down. I haven't looked at the book in about 5 years. I'll take a look and see if there is a tensor equation and on what page. Maybe you were reading a different book 8 years ago. Dave
265.5	This is weird	HARDY::BERNSTEIN	Deconstructive Grammatologist	`Fri Dec 19 1986 15:31`	13
	I have a book "Relativity" by Albert Einstein, and I don't remember seeing any Tensor equations, and certainly not on page two...but I haven't read the book, so maybe I forgot something...I have read more than the first two pages. OR, we're all part of a strange space-time warp that had to do with the event which published that book... I have other books on Relativity that DO have tensor equations in them, but...I don't know... Ed
265.6	A PARALLEL UNIVERSE...	EDEN::KLAES	Looking for nuclear wessels.	`Fri Dec 19 1986 16:31`	14
	Perhaps the original noter in this topic was somehow jolted from his slightly alternate parallel universe by an unusual space-time warp fluctuation in his sector of the Universe, and has been here for who knows how long without knowing it - until now, when he discovered that tensor equations were not written by Einstein in this Universe (I wonder what other subtle changes there are in that Universe?). The question is now, how do we get hm back to his own parallel universe? We cannot wait for another space-time flux, because of their random behavior. Does anyone know what to do? Larry
265.7	;-)	INK::KALLIS	Support Hallowe'en	`Fri Dec 19 1986 16:32`	6
	Re .6: Punt. Steve Kallis, Jr.
265.8	MEMORIES	GRECO::MISTOVICH		`Mon Jan 05 1987 17:55`	7
265.9	I thought I thought of that	SURPLS::GOLDBERG	Ed Goldberg	`Tue Jan 06 1987 09:11`	10
	re: .8 That's why I checked out my whole library of books. (I don't give books away - except for certain paperback science fiction.) I can't find any two books which may have merged into one memory. If I could, I would have had my explanation. But I don't. And unless someone comes up to me and tells me that he "borrowed" a book of mine without asking and that book happens to be close enough in title and author to confuse me (sounds unlikely given "Relativity" and "A. Einstein"), I doubt I'll ever have a solution.