I am doing vector problems. Lots of them. I find the vertical and horizontal components of one, or I find the resolution of two. If asked, I will resolve more than two together. This is why I learned all that trig last year. Whether force, velocity, or displacement, it is all vectorian.

Some time ago, a Friendly Scientist told me that the more physics you do, the more your view of the world changes. You see physics all around you. Even with my so-far limited encounter, I can see that happening. When I am driving in the Electron Car, I am vectoring. When other cars come near me, they are also vectoring, and hopefully not intersecting my own vector. My butt sitting in the computer chair is a vector, and so is the computer chair's "elastic recoil." The world is full of interacting objects: it is a vector world.

How much can my world-view change? When I am in artist or fantasy mode, the world is not full of abstract vectors, forces, and counterforces. It is full of stories and colors and mythology and symbolism and theologies and stacked universes of holy, unholy, alien or angelic beings. I used to live exclusively in that world, with only brief and necessary visits to the world of ordinary reality to pay the rent. Now I find myself commuting between the abstract, mathematical world of physics and the world of fictional or religious imagination.

Some people don't have this dual citizenship. Some live in a world of religiously described reality in which miracles happen in the "real" world and the stories in the holy texts are literally true. Others, including many (perhaps most?) scientists live in a non-theistic, non-fantastic world where there is only one criterion for "true" reality, namely experimental proof and mathematical description. Most other folks live somewhere in between, with less logical rigor.

What if there were metaphysical vectors? Vectors that gave us the vertical and horizontal components of our beliefs? Vectors that gave us the direction and speed of our journeys between different world-views? Or even moral vectors? When I was doing my research in Zoroastrianism (see my main webpage for more on this fascinating ancient philosophical religion) one of my teachers was the noble and learned Parsi Zoroastrian Kaikhosrov D. Irani, who was at that time a professor of philosophy at City College of New York. Dr. Irani had studied chemistry and physics, and his specialty was philosophy of science. He used to explain the difficult problem of moral and ethical dualism in the Zoroastrian religion by the metaphor of vectors. Zoroastrianism teaches that the forces of good and evil are always in conflict as long as this world exists, though at the end of time good will triumph over evil. But where are these forces of good and evil? Are they in the material world, corrupting not only humans but non-human things, or are they only in the world of human psychology and behavior? Dr. Irani said that "good" and "evil" existed not as personified, conflicting entities, but as vectors, directions and magnitudes of forces that had the potential to exist, but did not actually exist until something went that way. And perhaps in that way you could resolve the ambiguous moral world into components: an x of evil and a y of good.

Posted at 3:12 am | link