[b]Leonard Susskind
Before World War II, when physics was primarily a European enterprise, physicists used the Greek language to name particles. Photon, electron, meson, baryon, lepton, and even hadron originated from the Greek. But later brash, irreverent, and sometimes silly Americans took over, and the names lightened up. Quark is a nonsense word from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but from that literary high point, things went downhill. The distinctions between the different quark types are referred to by the singularly inappropriate term flavor. We might have spoken of chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, pistachio, cherry, and mint chocolate chip quarks but we don’t. The six flavors of quarks are up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top. At one point, bottom and top were considered too risqué, so for a brief time they became truth and beauty.[/b]
Figures, right?
At some point we have to give up and say that’s just the way it is. Or, not give up and push on.
In other words, before, one by one, we die.
From time to time, we hear physicists claim that Einstein didn’t understand Quantum Mechanics and therefore wasted his time with naive classical theories. I very much doubt that this is true. His arguments against Quantum Mechanics were extremely subtle, culminating in one of the most profound and most cited papers in all of physics. My guess is that Einstein was disturbed by the same thing that bothered the slow student. How could the ultimate theory of reality be about nothing more concrete than our own degree of surprise at the outcome of an experiment?
Anyone here disturbed too?
Quantum mechanics can be appreciated, to some degree, on a purely qualitative level. But mathematics is what brings its beauty into sharp focus. We have tried to make this amazing body of work fully accessible to mathematically literate nonphysicists.
As for the mathematically illiterate? Let’s not go there, okay?
…one of the key features of a black hole: different observers have paradoxically different perceptions of the same events.
Theoretically as it were.
The units that we use reflect our own size. The origin of the meter seems to be that it was used to measure rope or cloth: it’s about the distance from a person’s nose to his or her outstretched fingers. A second is about as long as a heartbeat. And a kilogram is a nice weight to carry around. We use these units because they are convenient, but fundamental physics doesn’t care that much about us.
For all we know it doesn’t care about anything at all.