Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Miscellaneous universe and the teacup universe and the teacup The Universe and the Teacup is a pretty interesting book with one purpose: To make math seem relevant and cool to people who have decided that they don’t like math. K. C. Cole pushes this idea by explaining how math applies to every imaginable thing in the universe, and how mathematicians are, in a sense, scientists. She also uses quotes to promote the coolness of math: “Understanding is a lot like sex,” states the first line of the book. This rather blunt analogy, as well as the passage that explains how bubbles meet at 120-degree angles, supports Cole’s theory that math can be applied to any subject. This approach of looking at commonplace objects and activities in a new way in order to associate them with math makes Cole’s comparison of mathematicians with scientists easier to understand. It requires one to look at mathematicians not just as people who know lots of facts and formulas, but rather as curious people who use these formulas to understand the world around them. Chapter two of The Universe and the Teacup deals with exponential numbers. More precisely, it deals with the difficulty humans have in processing very large and very small numbers. The term the book uses to describe this difficulty is “number numbness.” This numbness is natural, stemming from the fact that humans simply do not deal with such numbers very often, and even when they are dealt with, they are seen as words, not rational concepts. The fact that absolutely everyone suffers from this difficulty could prove to be harmful in the future, as population grows at the seemingly infinitesimal rate of 2% per year, an amount that is actually quite large when the current number of people on Earth is taken into account. The many examples Cole uses in this chapter serve to prove one point: Because our daily life does not require us to deal with them, we have very little true concept of very large and very small numbers. For many reasons, this inability to comprehend could prove to be very dangerous. Another mathematical concept we as humans tend to misunderstand is statistics, and how they should affect our risk-taking. In general, humans tend to avoid doing activities that have statistics showing a high risk for danger or failure, a concept that seems rather sound. However, this attitude is not always practiced. People also take into consideration whether or not the risk seems preventable or not. If an airline has a 1% rate of airplanes that go down, few people will fly that airline, because there is nothing they could do to prevent the plane from going down. However, in instances where people believe they can do something to prevent the undesired outcome, they are more likely to take the risk. For example, the odds of one’s partner having AIDS is rising at alarming rates, but people will still take that risk, assuming that using contraceptive devices will lower the risk of contracting AIDS. Psychological aspects factor into that decision as well. Many people will take that risk simply because it is something that they really want to do. One’s self-esteem and ego also play a part in many risk-taking situations. In instances where the risk is something preventable by the risk-taker, someone with high self-esteem would be likely to pursue that risk, having confidence that he could prevent the undesired outcome. Being a person of somewhat high self-esteem, I generally take these “preventable risks,” having parental and peer-pressure and approval as my main factors that weigh on my decision. The statement Cole gives in her chapter on scale, “We miss a great deal because we perceive only things on our own scale,” refers to the fact that although we look at some people as perfect and beautiful, and even at ourselves as quite attractive and healthy looking people, if we looked at ourselves on a closer scale, we would be quite shocked. Our skin is so cracked and full of minute cuts that we would be quite disgusted to see an “un-airbrushed” view of it. This idea of our scale as an airbrushed view of reality is what this chapter explains. It applies to many things, not just our bodies, of course. A microscopic view of ocean water, for instance, would be likely to cause anyone to think twice about swimming at the beach again. The same goes for bath water, which would also show colonies of little animals and bacteria under the microscope. Though scientists study this invisible world, most people are oblivious to it, only seeing the airbrushed view that our own scale gives us, losing the understanding of what makes up everything they are looking at. The idea of “more is different” introduced in Chapter 6 describes how simply reducing things to their smallest parts cannot help one to understand everything. In actuality, it cannot help one to understand almost anything. This unlikely statement can be understood by realizing that as things complicate, the rules change. For example, someone who knows all there is to know about biology will not know nearly all there is to know about psychology, because although psychology is often thought of as an applied use of biology, it contains many new ideas and rules. This sudden change in seemingly related things, things that appear to be simpler or more complex forms of each other, can be described as the “tipping,” or “critical point.” A good example of this “tipping point” is water and ice. They are two substances associated with each other, both made up of the same “smaller parts.” However, when water lowers that one degree, its properties shift drastically. It ceases to be a flowing liquid that permeates porous objects, and hardens into an inanimate solid. That one degree between 32 and 33 Fahrenheit could be described as the “tipping point,” at which one substance remains the same substance, yet obtains completely new properties. The cake-cutting tactic described in chapter 10 describes a way to ensure fairness in the division of a cake between two people (a tactic that can be applied to many other situations). It describes a situation in which one person gets to cut the cake, and the other person gets first choice on which piece will be his. Normally, this would not be fair, since the first person would have no say in which piece of cake he would receive. With a little cleverness, however, he can easily get the piece he wants. If he likes icing more than he likes cake, he can cut the side with more icing a bit smaller than the other side, in the hope that the other person will chose the larger side, leaving person one with the exact side he wanted. I think this is a good technique, though not at all a sure one. It would only guarantee the first person the piece he wanted if the second person did not like icing, or notice the first person’s trick, which he most likely would. However, if it does work, it guarantees fairness for both people. “The mathematics of truth” is one of the main themes of this book, and several examples are given throughout the book of how to determine the truth using mathematics. One that sticks out in my mind is the one involving King Solomon and two women claiming to be the mother of the same baby. Solomon, knowing that one must be lying, offered straight-facedly to slice the baby in two and give one half to each woman. The true mother, as Solomon expected, refused, preferring to give up her baby rather than have it killed. The other woman, however, trying to get as much as she could, agreed to the deal, having no emotional feelings for the child. Another example of math being used to prove a truth is the O.J. Simpson trial. According to DNA tests, the DNA found at the crime scene and the DNA in O.J.’s body did not match, indicating that someone other than O.J. committed the murder. The idea of the unreliability of cause and effect relationships is also introduced in this chapter. It stresses the importance of realizing the difference between cause and correlation and cause and effect. For example, children with big feet are correlated with high math scores among schoolchildren. This does not mean that kids with big feet have big brains and thus score higher on tests. A more likely cause would be that the children have the big feet because they are older, and score higher on math tests because they have had more years of math instruction than younger, small-footed children. This unclearness in the area of cause-and-effect can lead to questionable truths and court decisions. Though many causes can be correlated to an effect, few can be proven as a true cause. After reading the whole book, although I encountered many new ways of looking at things, there were only a few ideas that will probably affect me very much in the long run. One such concept is in the chapter about scale. It basically says that if we were much larger, we would collapse, due to physical laws of nature, and if we were much smaller, we would be unable to function, due to similar laws. This gave me the idea that everything is the size it is because it has to be. The scale of things on Earth is the only scale possible for Earth; just as the scale of things on other planets follow the physical laws of that planet. For instance, if people existed on Jupiter, they would have to be extremely large giants, due to the size of the planet. This is the only major change in thought I took away from this book, though it was filled with many interesting new ideas. Bibliography: Word Count: 1651
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