A Mind Blowing "Trip to Infinity"
Why I wish I'd had math teachers like Eugenia Cheng and Steve Strogatz.
In high school I was so incredibly jealous of my friends who took physics.
Physics was off limits to me because because I didn’t have the math skills. What was so frustrating was when I moved back to the US from England in 8th grade, I had a terrible algebra teacher and went from being a good math student to a lost one. Things went downhill from there.
But I heard my friends talking about the experiments they did in AP Physics and wished I were smart enough to take it too.
In business school, I had to take calculus Pass/Fail, and it’s the only course in my life that I almost failed. (Props to my cousin Rob, who got me through it when my professor couldn’t or wouldn’t).
Last night, The Head Shytrr and I watched the fantastic Netflix documentary, A Trip to Infinity, and I realized that I was/am smart enough. But especially with calculus, no one explained calculus to me - and especially the purpose of understanding calculus would in a way that I understood. If I’d had math teachers who explained concepts like the mathematicians in this documentary, I might have made it to AP Physics.
But I’m grateful that documentaries like this exist now, so I can continue my lifelong learning.
I loved that this documentary was interdisciplinary, exploring the concept of infinity from scientific and philosophical perspectives. Early on, I had the Head Shytrr (born Jewish, but an avowed atheist) pause it and explained to him that the feeling I get when contemplating infinity is the same emotional response I get when I think about God. I don’t buy into the old white dude with a beard in the sky vision of God. My view is that the force I call God is both feminine and masculine - the traditional religious depictions were for reinforcement of patriarchal structures.
That being said, I worship in the Jewish tradition because to me, it resonates because of family. When I hear familiar liturgy in synagogue, I hear the voices of my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. I decided to celebrate my 60th birthday by finally becoming a bat mitzvah. I was supposed to do it 1976, but we moved back from the UK to the US in 1975 and I rebelled, because I wasn’t happy. I’d planned to do a group adult Bnei Mitzvah a few years ago, but then Covid hit. So now I’m busy learning my Haftorah and trope to complete that circle.
Wouldn’t it be trippy if that circle turned out to be a wormhole?
Maybe I’d travel to a different part of the space/time continuum and meet the version of Sarah who became a bat mitzvah at 13. Or the Sarah who kept having good math teachers and was able to take AP Physics.
Highly recommend: A Trip to Infinity on Netflix