Since his "accident," Carlton Farthington has spoken entirely with the aid of a text-to-speech reader. These excerpts were recently delivered as "speeches" to Cape Fear Community College students at the Union Station auditorium. Go Sea Devils!
Text:
The problem we encounter in speaking on the ever-popular topic of "dimensions," especially of "higher dimensions" is that we lack the linguistic apparatus to explicate the deep mathematical concepts involved. We are finding that the great Mayan mathematicians may have developed a technical language more amply equipped to grapple systematically with these unwieldy ideas. Only now are we discovering stone tablets and in fact whole walls of writing that adumbrate some of their visionary experiments.
Ted Newhausen at Stanford is spearheading much of this research and I had the honor of accompanying him to Chichen Itza last summer. Let me tell you, the process of deciphering a pictographic language is an arduous one, and our modern languages (Ted and I know seven between the two of us) are indeed too small a vessel to contain the mighty, gushing stream that is the Mayan tongue. One finding, however, published by Ted in the September issue of Zygon, revealed a kind of "visual cliff" experiment whereby these mighty Mayan "men of math" determined the age at which a baby forms its first inklings of that thing we call "time."
We are learning, albeit slowly, how to explain these concepts that we so carelessly toss about like so many scraps of torn undergarments. Think about it: were you to approach the average man at his home and suggest to him that the "space" he inhabits has no conceptual value, you'd likely get nothing more out of him then a good boxing about the head. We are very attached to and even defensive about these concepts, as well we should be, but I would wager that even the boldest and most garrulous of mathematicians would be hard pressed to describe in plain language those ideas on which we place the very pillars of our existence.
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