Quote:
Originally Posted by Paradox244
Anyway, to get to the point of this rant, she once gave us a paper on the "dark sucker" theory. Basically it said that dark is real, light is the absence of dark, and light bulbs suck dark in instead of giving light off.
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I was amused when I read that your teacher gave this to you because the first place I read the "Dark Sucker" theory was in what was known as a g-file on a hacker bulletin board back in the 80's. Personally I think the document is a fantastic way of getting you to look at things exactly the opposite of what they appear to be. You can look at a Necker Cube and get similar reference shifting but the Dark Sucker theory does a much better job of driving the point into your brain because it is so humorously ridiculous. I think it should be taught to every kid to help their analytical skills. I know I have never viewed the world the same since I read it.
On another note, some of the things mentioned in previous posts such as dark being the absence of light remind me of the revelations I had as a kid when I realized on my own that dark was the absence of light, and cold was the absence of heat... I thought I was a freakin' genius for figuring that out. Same with when I figured out the impossibility of getting the square root of negative numbers. Imagine my surprise when my freshman algebra teacher yawned and told me about imaginary numbers... my brilliant discovery had already been discovered and hacked around.
Which brings me to another point. The whole thing with using i for imaginary numbers just seems like a huge hack. It makes me think that we have something wrong with our numbering system and math to have to work around something with a hack like that. Perhaps someday we'll find a more elegant way of representing math so that imaginary numbers work without using i.
15-February-2008, 12:44 AM
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