Posts tagged "physics":

time

Some months ago, the FQXi ran a contest on essays on the nature of time. Many interesting articles were submitted, and most if not all of the awarded ones are worth reading. Perhaps my favourite among them is Carlo Rovelli's Forget time (PDF). You can read an abstract and some reader comments here.

the dimensionality of the world

Although Bee has recently written an amazing and thorough article over at Backreaction with virtually everything one needs to know about extra dimensions in physics, let me add a sort of footnote in the form of some naive musings, a couple links and a Hertzian digression in this somewhat iffy post.

geometrically speaking

While a was a full-time physics and maths student, i seldom, if ever, thought of proving anything using a diagram, or any kind of non-algebraic method, for that matter. One could make a couple of drawings every now and then to help understanding, but that was all. Not even after learning differential geometry did my view change. As a matter of fact, with the emphasis on (and the beauty of) abstract representations (as in abstract tensor notations), using drawings of surfaces embedded in Euclidean space felt like cheating. To make things even worse, my first serious physics book had been Landau and Lifshitz's Classical Field Theory, where even words are scarce, let alone drawings or diagrammatic reasoning ¹. In a nutshell, i would have felt at home reading Lagrange's introduction to his Méchanique Analytic²:

the third policeman

leibniz space-times

More often than not, Lee Smolin's essays are engaging and thought provoking. I specially appreciate his willingness to tackle conceptual issues, often dismissed as philosophical or uninteresting by a great deal of the physics community (which, in my opinion, should know better). Also of note are his efforts to convey to non-specialists the key ideas and problems faced by modern physics, without unduly over-simplifications or dishonest hype.

physics quotes

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.