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"It's hard to tell stories about critters that are not human. John W. Campbell tried it, in "Twilight," and everybody says it's a wonderful story, and nobody ever reads it twice."
- Jerry Pournelle
 |
| Vizi-math | ||
| A device that accepts written equations and then provides a visualization of what it has been given. |
Jick was always trying to explain things to his lovely wife Oona. In this case, mathematics.
| "It's something the heads of the math and
physics departments have been working on
for the last seven years," Jick said. "Austin
says it has the finest robot brain ever yet
devised. At first it filled up the whole laboratory; now they've got it down to table
size. It's called the Vizi-math..."
The answer to the dumb student's prayer. "You write any mathematical expression on a piece of paper, feed it into the machine - it has a scanner, of course - and watch the vizi-plate. What you get is a translation into visual terms of the mathematical expression you were interested in. Austin says he'd always been a little shaky about vector analysis, and the Vizi-math cleared the subject up for him in a way he wouldn't have thought possible..." "Austin says that some of the stuff you get on the vizi-plate in higher math almost frightens him. Uncanny, sort of..." "I brought the Vizi-math in here," Austin explained, pulling the plugs of the chronnox out of the socket and inserting that of the Vizi-math, "because it has to go on an appliance circuit. It needs a lot of power. There. What do you think of it?"
 ('Aleph Sub One' by Margaret St. Clair) Oona stepped back and looked at the thing. The machine was about three feet long, the shape of a rather plump cigar, and plated all over with some bright metal which had a faintly bluish cast. Oona didn't know why, but for some reason it reminded her of a coffin, a coffin for an abnormally small adult or a child... On a piece of paper he got out of his pocket (Oona thought it looked like a laundry bill) Austin wrote: (a+b)²=a²+2ab+b² He put the bit of paper into a small orificе on the front of the Vizi-math, pressed an inconspicuous button on the side, and said, "Now, watch." A large section of the plating along the top of the Vizi-math became faintly luminous. The metal grew translucent, then transparent. "The Vizi-plate's warming up," Austin said. On the lighted surface two horizontal lines of unequal length appeared, one of them labeled a, the other b. They moved toward each other, joined. Three new lines, all labeled a+b, joined themselves at right angles to the original a+b to make a square, corresponding a and b portions opposite on opposite sides... The four members of the a+b square moved away from each other and came back together several times. The vizi-plate read (a+b)2=a²+2ab+b. The Vizi-math seemed to be determined that Oona got the idea. |
| Technovelgy from Aleph Sub One,
by Margaret St. Clair. Published by Startling Stories in 1948 Additional resources -
|
Oona decides to test the Vizi-math by making up an extremely complex equation of her own design, which includes an aleph with a 1 under it. The Vizi-math does its best while Oona goes to the beauty parlor.
As she understood it, from what the scientists were saying, it was by the merest fluke
that she'd made up an equation which had
driven the Vizi-math, in its frantic attempt
to visualize it, to creating a sort of superdimensional whorl. Dr. Preeble had said that
that odd-looking cube affair she'd seen had
been an instaneous tesseract. If that meant
anything...
...the Vortex
had swallowed up an area six city blocks
square and was expanding at unpredictable
but frequent intervals.
Oh, they were doing all they could. They'd
sprayed the Vortex with firehoses, sent volunteers (who hadn't been seen afterwards)
into it, and tried to blow it up with dynamite. They had even got permission from
the Security Council and dropped a small,
carefully-shielded, atomic bomb. The Vortex had paid no attention of any kind to these
attacks. It rotated slowly and kept on looking
like the water running out of a sink.
Oona saves the world by thinking of a modification for her equation, which she cleverly sticks into the vortex while no one is looking:
The house-their house, the house she and
Jick had worked on so hard, the house they
had just barely finished paying for-was
gone. An unnatural reddish blur, a thing
that rotated slowly and was shaped like the
whirlpool you get when water runs out of
the sink, seemed to have taken its place...
I made a mistake. I'm sorry. N doesn't equal
five. Zero (0) is what n is equal to.
Oona.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Aleph Sub One
More Ideas
and Technology by Margaret St. Clair
Tech news articles related to Aleph Sub One
Tech news articles related to works by Margaret St. Clair
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'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
