They Didn't Teach This When I Was in School!

Six graders are now required to know the “nets” of three-dimensional figures in their math classes. Have any of you even heard of “nets”? Yeah, there are hairnets and fishnets. There are even dragnets. But this is something unique to math.

I know I had never heard of it. Let me kill the suspense and tell you what it is. It is a figure that results from unfolding an n-dimensional figure into an n-1 space. Still confused? Let’s put it another way: If you made a three-dimensional figure with a piece of paper by folding it; then its net would be the unfolded piece of paper.

This is hard to visualize, I know. However the kids are given constructed three-dimensional figures (i.e. pyramids, prisms, cylinders, etc.) that can be unfolded. It is a great teaching aid. They unfold them and see the nets for themselves.

For example, suppose you want to unfold a square pyramid. Here is what it looks like:



If you folded up the vertexes A, B, C, and D, you would have the three-dimensional square pyramid again.

So why should kids know this? I have heard of “thinking outside the box” but this is thinking outside the square pyramid.

Working in the school system with all this new math, has warped my mind. I actually see a reason for this. I will share it with you.

They didn’t teach the Big Bang Theory when we were in school either, did they? Believe it or not all this is somehow related. You see, scientists believe that our Universe was created out of a higher dimension—one that we cannot see or visualize in our minds. I know it is hard to understand, or at least it was for me. Maybe you are smarter.

Let’s go through this concept in baby steps.

Let’s look at the net of a higher dimension. That is possible, you know. We cannot, for example, see a 4-dimensional figure, but we can see its net. This is so because when you unfold a dimension, you see it in the next lower dimension. That square pyramid above was reduced to a 2-dimensional figure using this process. So it makes sense that we could see the basis for a 4-dimensional figure by unfolding it down to a 3-dimensional net. Right? Here’s one now:



This is the net of a 4-dimensional figure called a hypercube. We cannot visualize a hypercube but we can see its net as you see above.

Enough of these baby steps! Let’s get right to the meat of the subject! You know, the Big Bang and how it relates to these nets. Okay.

We want the kids to learn at an early age how to deal with math of things we cannot see. One huge gift of the human mind is to be able to hypothesize and build upon abstraction. Math allows us to do that. We can create geometry well beyond the three dimensions that we can see and touch.

So, as if I have not scared the hell out of most readers already with this new math, let me work closer to the final part of this installment. The current scientific belief is that our Universe was created from 10-dimensions. Further, based on something called the “String Theory”, it is believed that the basic unit of all matter are vibrating strings that freely travel in an out of dimensions we cannot see but only mathematically deal with.

Pretty heavy, huh? Perhaps this is more understandable: For survival, we (future generations projected millions of years into the future) need to travel somewhere off this planet some day and find a new place to live. Speculation is that the nearest candidates would be many, many light-years away by a vehicle moving at the speed of light. We cannot travel at that speed and probably never will even come close. That leaves another alternative: We escape this geometry via another route. Some scientists refer to them as “rabbit holes”. This requires us to understand the shape of the Universe in which we live. Only higher math will enable future scientists to crack this need.

I can remember having trouble with just understanding algebra. I bet you can relate to that too. The future of the human race is in the hands of others. Thank God we older folks don't have to figure it out!