not had this feeling for a long time...

had two physics papers today! argh very scared of careless mistakes, and i know i've got some mistakes already, be they careless or due to my lousy brain...must not think about it anymore!

anyway, been really slack today...i've not done any studying the whole day...except studying string theory...haha that sounds so lame! i've only seen it for a few days, and reading some layman accounts of it...very absorbed by Michio Kaku's book, Hyperspace...yeah when i first saw that bk in the sch library, and i saw the words "10th dimension" i thought...oh no not another more-than-4 dimension popular lame and over hyped what-the-hell-is-that?! thing. I must be excused for this! after all, i'm rather tired of seeing pple so interested in relativity and einstein-is-great and sprouting abt 10, 20 or N-dimension universe parallel universe when they take up such magazines as Discover and Scientific American. Hell i had no idea what these things were! I've been rather bewildered why everyone likes to talk abt relativity! Not that i think many pple know what they're talking abt...I've totally ignored (almost completely) relativity and focused on understanding Quantum Mechanics instead. But QM books are often placed alongside things with names such as "supersymmetry", "superstrings"...and a few days ago i guess i decided i must not be left out...

So now i feel that same way as i felt 5, 6 yrs ago when i first read popular accounts abt QM...it feels intriguing, interesting, beautiful! and keeps me stuck to the book...i'm sure its a good beginning. perhaps a few yrs down the road i can start understanding more math and reading more abt the theory, which is rather new and everything's like all over the place, unlike QM where i can look at a couple of basic postulates that give me a good summary of the basic principle... dammit, i severely lack the math man! Even for QM, i'm still taking a long time to take in the stuff, reread and reread again...but i think its very very beautiful when all the things start to fall in place, no matter how slowly it happens/is happening, and when the things you read in popular accounts are starting to REALLY show up as MATH!

Anyway, i'm gonna start recording in this blog, some questions and identifying assumptions and all that...i've learnt that assumptions are very crucial things...gotta hunt down the elusive assumptions we constantly subconsciously make, to break new ground...so here goes:

what's with dimensions? What are dimensions?
Is there something more general than dimensions?

can there be more than one set of dimensions? (ie. instead of 1st,2nd...etc dimensions, could we have like the 1,5 dimension?)

Non integer numbers for dimensions? e.g. 1.5th dimension?

do the extra 6 dimensions as claimed by string theory have to be too small to see? could they also be too BIG to see? Does the difficulty or even impossibility to perceive them necessarily be due to relative sizes of dimensions?

Often a distinction has been made between the dimension of time, as a temporal dimension, as compared to that of the spatial dimensions, as in x,y,z,whatever-follows...is this distinction necessary? could time be another spatial dimension, which due to our nature, we experience it the way we do?

I like the way Hinton (as described by Kaku) talks abt the perception of a higher dimension object from a lower dimension object's perspective...