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Stafford: Imagination, math at work in sky

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer 12:32 AM Sunday, July 26, 2009

Across the street, above the Howards’ house, I spotted a horse, its legs extended in full gallop, drifting east over an expanse of open sky.

The head was actually more of a sea-horse than a horse.

No matter. It was all a trick of my imagination paired with a limited vocabulary of shapes.

Taking in the cloud, my mind did a quick search of its shape data base, came up with an answer and slid the thought (horse) to my conscious mind like a note passed under the door.

After I picked up the note, a thought came to me.

What about all the other clouds in the sky — the ones whose shapes can’t be found in my “A is for aardvark” vocabulary of shapes? How can I learn to recognize them?

Math, I thought.

I seemed to remember hearing at some point that mathematics is the language of shapes. Formulas describe triangles and circles, squares, spheres, pentagons and hexagons. More complex formulas describe patterns that might explain how the clouds of an evening sky mimic the scouring powder that settles in the bottom of my bathtub.

But I wondered whether the mathematical description could be as poetic as the visual comparison — whether putting numbers to the shapes might ruin the fun of finding shapes in the afternoon sky.

Dan Fleisch, who teaches physics at Wittenberg University, who told me he has noticed similar problems with his students who study shapes in the night sky — stars, galaxies and constellations.

“They’re afraid the magic and mystery” they feel in the presence of the universe “will disappear if they understand the math,” he said, afraid it all will become “just math.”

His solution? To prescribe more math.

The formulas he suggests don’t describe static shapes, but shapes in motion —including shapes created in galaxies.

Paired with the power of computers, the math can allow his students to change a variable in the equation and see how it affects the development of a simulated galaxy.

With the same program, “you can take two galaxies and run them into one another” just to see what happens,” Fleisch said.

And what happens, he said, is the creation of “these incredible shapes.”

As his students are marvelling over the shapes, he sends them to a book that is an astrophysicist’s version of my “A is for Aardvark” book of shapes, “The Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies.”

And no matter what kind of galaxy their mathematical tinkering comes up with, they can find it there. Which means something very close to their theoretical galaxy already can be found somewhere in the universe.

In this way, students can be assured of the thing I was looking for: a sense that the creative force of the mind that wonders at existence and picks shapes out of the sky is part of a larger creative force at work all over the universe.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.

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