Can math change your life too?

The last post was for the assignment for the online marketing course to write about some literature that changed my life. But it isn’t just literature that changes me. I may have majored in creative writing but I minored in mathematics. There is something about the way that math works that illuminates my life in a similar way that literature does.

So I’d like to tell you the short version of that the summer before I began college where I took a seminar class on String Theory at Cambridge University. I learned the mathematics of these strings, but what I remember most is not the technical stuff, but that strings break down what it means to be.

Atoms can be broken into protons, neutrons, electrons, into the pieces of those, the quarks and other subatomic particles. To cut again, infinitely small with the razor blade of God, to when there is nothing more to divide, there are strings. These strings are not made of matter, they are energy, and lots of these energies make up everything.

Professor Yves’ first language was Dutch, and he was soft spoken. I sat front row to hear him, to see the curves of integration on the chalkboard, the 12 dimensions of space when I can only wrap my head around the standard four. What would it even mean to be a part of dimension seven?

“Nothing,” he said. “You are in it, and you can’t even feel it. It is like this.” He snapped his fingers. “And not like that, because even that is too much.”

This math explodes my definition of religion, what God is, because if God is energy then he can be these strings and make up everything. Or these strings, which governed the Big Bang, Yves said, could be God, and God could have exploded the universe to expand infinitely.

To see a graph stretch towards positive and negative infinity could be the stretch of time, back for forever and forward for forever.