Arthur Miller
Einstein and Schrödinger never fully accepted the highly abstract nature of Heisenberg's quantum mechanics, says Miller. They agreed with Galileo's assertion that "the book of nature is written in mathematics", but they also realized the power of using visual imagery to represent mathematical symbols.
I am a bit of a fanatic when it comes to the visualizations. What benefit might these have for any good theorist? What creative ability is developed, when one sees this way?
To me, as it has been described with Dirac wording that I have spell out many a time, there is also all this "other information" that has to be followed up. I know it. Many science people know it. Maybe sometimes, caught up in all the aspirations for truth, I might not remember it. So this post is here for this purpose.
You have to trust me that I will not be knocking on any good scientists door, being the crackpot that I am, with some amazing discovery.I just don't have time to bother you good science people.:)
Anyway, I thought I should clear up some ideas people have about learning. Getting some insight into what is being talked about in regards to theoretical ideas being borne, what learning the older folk like me can look forward too. The last part of this post is in regards to Think Quest comments on string theory.
Personally, I think a good theoretician needs to know a lot.
I found information provided by Gerard t’ Hooft which gives one a a good base to what he thought we should be doing. So I wanted to include some of that here as well. Also by including each of the links, typing into the "search fucntion," this post, should come up, and the related subjects, as to what should be known.
I created one on the requirements of mathematics sometime ago as well so this would be a good source link as well to the requirements needed to work within the string theory realm. I am still looking for it. You cna see now why this post is good for memory retention being somewhat lost as to where it is put under.
Is your motivation and pursuance of knowledge up to it?
HOW to BECOME a GOOD THEORETICAL PHYSICISTby Gerard 't Hooft
Theoretical Physics is like a sky scraper. It has solid foundations in elementary mathematics and notions of classical (pre-20th century) physics. Don't think that pre-20th century physics is "irrelevant" since now we have so much more. In those days, the solid foundations were laid of the knowledge that we enjoy now. Don't try to construct your sky scraper without first reconstructing these foundations yourself. The first few floors of our skyscraper consist of advanced mathematical formalisms that turn the Classical Physics theories into beauties of their own. They are needed if you want to go higher than that. So, next come many of the other subjects listed below. Finally, if you are mad enough that you want to solve those tremendously perplexing problems of reconciling gravitational physics with the quantum world, you end up studying general relativity, superstring theory, M-theory, Calabi-Yau compactification and so on. That's presently the top of the sky scraper. There are other peaks such as Bose-Einstein condensation, fractional Hall effect, and more. Also good for Nobel Prizes, as the past years have shown. A warning is called for: even if you are extremely smart, you are still likely to get stuck somewhere. Surf the net yourself. Find more. Tell me about what you found. If this site has been of any help to someone while preparing for a University study, if this has motivated someone, helped someone along the way, and smoothened his or her path towards science, then I call this site successful. Please let me know. Here is the list.
Think Math
While I quickly jumped to the end of the third page of reference below, it summarizes a bit as to what culminations might be found with the math in all it's aspects describe as the language. The language(herein described as the math), brings it together nicely. Whole.
Guide to Math, by Superstringtheory.com
Noncommutative geometry (NCG for short)
Geometry was originally developed to describe physical space that we can see and measure. After modern mathematics was freed from Euclid's Fifth Axiom by Gauss and Bolyai, Riemann added to modern geometry the abstract notion of a manifold M with points that are labeled by local coordinates that are real numbers, with some metric tensor that determines an extremal length between two points on the manifold.
Much of the progress in 20th century physics was in applying this modern notion of geometry to spacetime, or to quantum gauge field theory.
In the quest to develop a notion of quantum geometry, as far back as 1947, people were trying to quantize spacetime so that the coordinates would not be ordinary real numbers, but somehow elevated to quantum operators obeying some nontrivial quantum commutation relations. Hence the term "noncommutative geometry," or NCG for short.
The current interest in NCG among physicists of the 21st century has been stimulated by work by French mathematician Alain Connes.
While the truer quest of seeing is in the world of mathematics used besides english, is the real language of commonality among scientists. It serves them well to understand how all these maths could add up too, what is required of those students of youth, and youth of mind of those advacing in age, that we see this described someplace.
Nature's patterns
So who is right? Well, there is much that is attractive in the Platonist point of view. It's tempting to see our everyday world as a pale shadow of a more perfect, ordered, mathematically exact one. For one thing, mathematical patterns permeate all areas of science. Moreover, they have a universal feel to them, rather as though God thumbed His way through some kind of mathematical wallpaper catalogue when He was trying to work out how to decorate His Universe. Not only that: the deity's pattern catalogue is remarkably versatile, with the same patterns being used in many different guises. For example, the ripples on the surface of sand dunes are pretty much identical to the wave patterns in liquid crystals. Raindrops and planets are both spherical. Rainbows and ripples on a pond are circular. Honeycomb patterns are used by bees to store honey (and to pigeonhole grubs for safekeeping), and they can also be found in the geographical distribution of territorial fish, the frozen magma of the Giant's Causeway, and rock piles created by convection currents in shallow lakes. Spirals can be seen in water running out of a bath and in the Andromeda Galaxy. Frothy bubbles occur in a washing-up bowl and the arrangement of galaxies.
Imagine calling someone with this background "flaky" because of a "strange idea" that might be borne in mind, while it is encompassed by all this knowledge of science, respectively? People who had been well intentioned, hiding all the information because they might have been taunted by those who were not respectful of the age of reason, with which they had applied them self.
I think every teacher, Mother, Father understands the best they have for their student, child respectively, and what they strive to encourage in regards to the independence and strength, to move forward with the motivation that is borne in every good seeker of truth?
ThinkQuest
Think Quest is all about students thinking and learning together. Students work in teams to create the best educational websites and compete for exciting prizes, including a trip to Think Quest Live, an educational extravaganza celebrating their achievements.
Sponsored by the Oracle Education Foundation, the competition offers a unique project-based learning experience to students and teachers around the world. Globally relevant subjects and diverse teams are encouraged.
The teams' websites are published for the world to see in the Think Quest Library. This rich online resource contains over 5,500 educational websites, created by students for students. Search the library and you'll be sure to find a site that intrigues you.
Information Links Below Created by Dan Corbett, Kate Stafford, and Patrick Wright for ThinkQuest.
Well so easily explained in the english language, Gerard's comments about explaining what we are doing now bears fruit? My inept capilities with this of courses draws recognition, let alone, the need to write those visionary qualities to algebraic equations. So Penrose has more words for us, besides his change of heart?:)
You think it easy to change the ingraininess of our methods that we should let them drop away easily? Find a new path/math with a heart? It is not without thinking that such decisions are made.
[ROGER PENROSE]
"One particular thing that struck me... [LAUGHTER]...is the fact that he found it necessary to translate all the results that he had achieved with such methods into algebraic notation. It struck me particularly, because remember I am told of Newton, when he wrote up his work, it was always exactly the opposite, in that he obtained so much of his results, so many of his results using analytical techniques and because of the general way in which things at that time had to be explained to people, he found it necessary to translate his results into the language of geometry, so his contemporaries could understand him. Well, I guess geometry… [INAUDIBLE] not quite the same topic as to whether one thinks theoretically or analytically, algebraically perhaps. This rule is perhaps touched upon at the beginning of Professor Dirac's talk, and I think it is a very interesting topic."
A more direct link to quote above on page 12.