Monday, December 10, 2007

Problems

Newton’s first law is the law of inertia; extended in a simple fashion it is the law of the status quo. Newton’s law of universal gravitation is fundamentally also Coulomb’s law of electrostatic attraction, which is not to say that the macro and the micro necessarily behave in the same way, but rather to remind that different scales and spheres may share fundamental properties that are unnamed and unrecognised.

 

That is perhaps a clear manifesto of a lumper.

 

Problems may be peculiar to their contexts but the experiment seeks to generalise, to abstract rather than make concrete. If the specific can educate to the abstract then that generalisation can be more widely applied specifically: algebra is genie to arithmetic. I am being clumsy and inarticulate. It takes genius to be simple, clear and I am tired and frustrated.

 

Simple problems allow for simple solutions. Even complex problems allow for simple solutions: the Gordian knot was cut.

 

I do not know if my problem is simple or complex; it’s boundaries, it’s density or it’s field. Step one: define the problem. Some problems defy definition. Where disagreement exists and one cannot simply agree to disagree because action is binary and mutually exclusive how does one proceed without insanity?

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