Any of you guys get into Richard Feynman? I've listened to some of his (introductory) physics lectures in the past, and have more recently starting listening to his other (non-physics-lecture) books. (He has quite a remarkable career as a physicist, starting his career at Los Alamos all the way through serving as a professor emeritus at Cal Tech.
Truth be told--I'm kind of envious of that time. How cool would it be to be straight out of grad school, working with the best and brightest at Los Alamos? Talk about being born into the right field at the right time--But I digress...
I couldn't help to think of M when RFP was describing how he would do physics for the sake of physics. (The sheer enjoyment of the process.) The best example is when he noticed how the stream of water actually gets smaller the farther it is from the spout. He then calculated the arc of the curve of water, just because. (Similarly, he calculated the math behind how a frisbee can wobble in flight.)
If any of you guys find that kind of life observation interesting, it may be worth a read or listen...
Truth be told--I'm kind of envious of that time. How cool would it be to be straight out of grad school, working with the best and brightest at Los Alamos? Talk about being born into the right field at the right time--But I digress...
I couldn't help to think of M when RFP was describing how he would do physics for the sake of physics. (The sheer enjoyment of the process.) The best example is when he noticed how the stream of water actually gets smaller the farther it is from the spout. He then calculated the arc of the curve of water, just because. (Similarly, he calculated the math behind how a frisbee can wobble in flight.)
If any of you guys find that kind of life observation interesting, it may be worth a read or listen...
posted by Greg | 1:34 PM
3 Comments:
It's funny how you mention Matt in light of this post. One of my strongest memories of Wheaton - and I'm not kidding - is walking into a room where Matt had a large pad of graph paper sitting on his desk. He had just finished deriving the formulas that would allow him to accurately plot a picture of what it would look like to poke a hole in a hollow rubber ball and then flip it inside out. In that moment, he radiated a happiness that I never saw in the same way again. It was just pure joy for him.
I read Feynman's Six Easy Pieces a while ago, but that's it.
As for Scott's anecdote... yes, those were the days. The days before any kind of computer assistance! Hard to conceive of nowadays, what with me so attached to Mathematica. I do kind of miss those days when, for want of considerable computing power, I'd fill pages and pages of tedious computations and equation-solving.
I've been thinking on and off (for over a decade) about why I get so obsessive about math stuff. A big part of it is its power. You can use it to do things that the average person sees as impossible.
Oh and it was a square box, not a ball. :)
I think my dislike of physics comes from the fact that most of what you learn for the first ten or so years is worthless. Consider a car driving at 88 MPH. Ok, I'm interested. Now, ignore gravity. Ignore acceleration. Ignore wind resistance, tidal forces, magnetism, space-time, road conditions, atmospheric density......
At the end of the problem, you find the car capable of jumping a 100 foot chasm giving the launch trajectory, speed, etc. Now some bonehead decides to try this in real life after having a couple drinks because he remembers taking a physics class 10 years ago.
I'll stick with my computers which are implicitly untrustworthy and disliked by the majority of the population.
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