Giovanni
paraphrasing Einstein, I declare that time must slow down under the pull of complex physics.
paraphrasing Heisenberg, i hereby declare that you cannot explain complex concepts concisely and clearly at the same time.
Maybe if you know these topics reasonably well you can enjoy a cursory review in a 6-hour stroll (which is what happened to me for the concepts I was already familiar with), but if you want to understand them for the first (or second) time, a ‘brief history' won't do. You end up reading paragraphs like this, shrugging, and moving on:
Four years later, a possible solution, called “supergravity,” was suggested. The idea was to combine the spin-2 particle called the graviton, which carries the gravitational force, with certain other particles of spin 3/2, 1, ½, and 0. In a sense, all these particles could then be regarded as different aspects of the same “superparticle,” thus unifying the matter particles with spin ½ and 3/2 with the force-carrying particles of spin 0, 1, and 2. The virtual particle/antiparticle pairs of spin ½ and 3/2 would have negative energy, and so would tend to cancel out the positive energy of the spin 2, 1, and 0 virtual pairs. This would cause many of the possible infinities to cancel out, but it was suspected that some infinities might still remain.
“Well, what should I read?” you say. I recommend Carroll, Susskind, Great Courses, biographies of Einstein, Dirac, von Neumann, Feynman. “But it takes time!” you object. Well, QED
Interesting read, but I find it peculiar that Richard Feynman had such a refreshing and honest take on scientific publishing and reporting (i.e. that it should be honest and not a carefully manufactured story in which all the mistakes and false leads are omitted), and then allowed for himself a carefully crafted, self-indulgent (hagiographical I dare say) memoir, with all the big and small successes, but no mistakes, doubts, or regrets.
Some take stimulants to keep going, I read biographies of TR, Churchill, Hamilton, and the like. I might have found them obnoxious in real life, but boy they sure spur me into activity! Who else can I add to this list of stimulants?
I also liked Taft, who now seems underappreciated. Their tumultuous friendship reminded me of that between Adams and Jefferson. What are other examples of rollercoaster friendships between public figures?
