Reflective Essay

      Through pursuing my interest in math and physics, I stumbled upon Tom Bearden's web site and his work with James Clerk Maxwell's original work on electromagnetism and quaternion math. At the time I had no idea what this quaternion math was. I proceeded to ask everyone I knew that new anything about math what they new about quaternions. The answers were almost invariably the same: They had a vague remembering of something about it, but didn't really know what it was. With this research projects emphasis on new knowledge the subject of quaternions came to mind because no one I knew knew anything about it. There also seemed something very ghostly about it in the sense that it was an old form of math (discovered in the mid 1800's) and knowledge of it seemed to have disappeared. To narrow down on a question that I could ask about quaternions that was manageable for a ten page research paper, I found that feedback from my peers was helpful in that it helped put the scope of my ambitions in to perspective. I had already y done quite a bit of my own research into the topics so when I did my initial preliminary research into the subject, I felt like I was exposed to new areas of interest that only served to broaden the possible scope of the question that I was to ask. As I stated above, I found the feed pack from my peers and professor in the conference setting to be very help in shedding some perspective from the point of view of the reader. I received comments saying I should define the terms that I was using and that I might have to broad of topics included in my question. I realized that in my interests I some time lose sight of what people around me know and the language that they use day today. I realized that not only would I need to scale down the scope of my question as well as spend more time defining terms that others might find foreign. I feel good about my work in this class so far as far as keeping up with the work is concerned. I feel like I have holes in my note taking abilities and that they have been exposed more in this class than in others. I think this is a good thing and gives me the opportunity to improve on them. I think my work in this class reveals my writing and analyzing abilities as they are, not too bad, but could use some inprovent. What they don't reveal is more of the thought process that I've had about these subjects behind the writing.