Fun article, but I think the connection to Middle-Earth is tenuous at best. I had hopes that there was going to be some interaction between trolls and humans, but he ends up just using the tree-like beings.
The special rel just-so story I had got was night people and day people, and the night people had set true N to the north star, while the day people used the midpoint of sunrise and sunset for true N, so all their cardinal directions were rotated relative to each other.
They were then confused why their measurements of distances always agreed but of position always differed, until someone came up with the rotation equations that allowed one to map day to night and night to day.
Change normal trigonometric rotation to hyperbolic, and you've got most of special rel.
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Fun article, but I think the connection to Middle-Earth is tenuous at best. I had hopes that there was going to be some interaction between trolls and humans, but he ends up just using the tree-like beings.
The special rel just-so story I had got was night people and day people, and the night people had set true N to the north star, while the day people used the midpoint of sunrise and sunset for true N, so all their cardinal directions were rotated relative to each other.
They were then confused why their measurements of distances always agreed but of position always differed, until someone came up with the rotation equations that allowed one to map day to night and night to day.
Change normal trigonometric rotation to hyperbolic, and you've got most of special rel.
This story is in the beginning of the Taylor-Wheeler book the article mentions