"What happened, Norman? Where have you been? They said you didn't make it into work yesterday."
Groggy, he replied. "I had an idea. But I lost it."
Leigh let herself in, stepping gingerly through the minefield of aborted projects: half-emerged bears and obelisks, potato-headed steeds,diamond-bodied snakes... a geometric menagerie nipped at her heels. "This looks painful, Norm. You need to stop."
Norm grimaced at the words. "Nobody else knows what they look like. I don't even know, until it's done."
"God, you're melodramatic. Where's the Febreze?"
Leigh saw it: an impossible thing, sitting in the mistakes. She stretched out her hand, but didn't know how to pick it up, how to approach it. Norm strode up to it, and snatched it off the ground.
"You found it. That's my Escher Box." He placed it on the table; Leigh was entranced by it. "I started with some simple ones; they're over there. Got some spaghetti noodles and bubble gum. But that's just an optical illusion. I was feeling ambitious..."
Leigh stared into the box. One interior wall was carved like fur, another like collapsing stars. She picked it up at the edges, starring into a spiral with fluttering edges. From her vantage point, the corners had opened a door into her hand. She turned it to a side...
"...I remembered about Fibonacci sequences, Mandlebrot sets, mathematical formulas that could be graphed and visualized more articulately than they could be explained on paper. I mean, we're reaching a point of mathematics that can't be fathomed with numbers, or imaginary numbers, or anything you can put on a chalkboard..."
She examined the other end. Leigh was staring into the vortex now, trying to peek past a corner, which seemed to bend deeper and deeper...
"Once I grasped the concept of multi-dimensional formulation - well, half-grasped it. I realized if I got too much into it, I would-"
Norm's rambling was interrupted by the clatter of the box, landing on the floor. Leigh had disappeared.
inspired by the Discover Magazine article, "Amplituhedron May Shape the Future of Physics"
Leigh let herself in, stepping gingerly through the minefield of aborted projects: half-emerged bears and obelisks, potato-headed steeds,diamond-bodied snakes... a geometric menagerie nipped at her heels. "This looks painful, Norm. You need to stop."
Norm grimaced at the words. "Nobody else knows what they look like. I don't even know, until it's done."
"God, you're melodramatic. Where's the Febreze?"
Leigh saw it: an impossible thing, sitting in the mistakes. She stretched out her hand, but didn't know how to pick it up, how to approach it. Norm strode up to it, and snatched it off the ground.
"You found it. That's my Escher Box." He placed it on the table; Leigh was entranced by it. "I started with some simple ones; they're over there. Got some spaghetti noodles and bubble gum. But that's just an optical illusion. I was feeling ambitious..."
Leigh stared into the box. One interior wall was carved like fur, another like collapsing stars. She picked it up at the edges, starring into a spiral with fluttering edges. From her vantage point, the corners had opened a door into her hand. She turned it to a side...
"...I remembered about Fibonacci sequences, Mandlebrot sets, mathematical formulas that could be graphed and visualized more articulately than they could be explained on paper. I mean, we're reaching a point of mathematics that can't be fathomed with numbers, or imaginary numbers, or anything you can put on a chalkboard..."
She examined the other end. Leigh was staring into the vortex now, trying to peek past a corner, which seemed to bend deeper and deeper...
"Once I grasped the concept of multi-dimensional formulation - well, half-grasped it. I realized if I got too much into it, I would-"
Norm's rambling was interrupted by the clatter of the box, landing on the floor. Leigh had disappeared.
inspired by the Discover Magazine article, "Amplituhedron May Shape the Future of Physics"
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