There has been a general customer complaint about my blogs that they are complicated and sometimes confusing.
Here is an extract from a book I am reading that puts the matter in perspective.
The name of the book is “The Trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin.
“As I reflect on the scientific careers of the people I have known these last thirty years, it seems to me more and more that these career decisions hinge on character. Some people will happily jump on the next big thing and give it all they’ve got, and in this way make important contributions to fast moving fields. Others just don’t have the temperament to do this. Some people need to think through everything carefully, and this takes time, as they get easily confused. It’s not hard to feel superior to such people, until you remember that Einstein was one of them. In my experience, the truly shocking and new ideas and innovations tend to come from such people. Still others – and I belong to this third group – just have to go their own way, and flee fields for no better reason than that it offends them that some people are joining in because it feels good to be on the winning side. So I no longer get bothered when I disagree with what other people are doing, because I see that temperament pretty much determines what kind of science they will do. Luckily for science, contributions of the whole range of types are needed. Those who do good science, I’ve come to think, do so because they chose problems that are suited to them.”
The author is talking about an opportunity to work with a group working on a theory of supergravity. He further says –
“In any case I fled the Stony Brook supergravity group but I didn’t lose interest in supergravity. On the contrary, I was more interested than ever. I was sure they were onto something, but the road they were taking was not the one I could follow. I understood Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which meant that I knew how to demonstrate every essential property of it in a page or less of concise and transparent work. It seemed to me that if you understood a theory, it shouldn’t take weeks of calculations on an art pad to check its basic properties.”
The author – Lee Smolin – is a pioneering theoretical physicist and the critically acclaimed author of The Life of the Cosmos and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. He earned his PhD in physics at Harvard, before teaching at Yale and Pennsylvania State, and went on to help found the innovative Perimeter Institute.
I have read only about 100 pages of the 400-odd page book and I am in awe.
Wish all readers of Jignyaasaa a very Happy New Year 2010!!
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