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Showing posts from August, 2017

Why?

Why is probably the best question we can ask because it's quickly answered.   If teachers would just explain why rather than telling how students would all be geniuses.   A lot of times you can ask a teacher why and they wont have an explanation.  But at least "I don't know" acknowledges that it's a good question.     They can explain the what (the definition).  And how as in: (How it works).  How to use it.  How to solve problems involving it but rarely do they cover "Why it is the case and all the little questions that pop up.   Let me give an example.   I have a question on my mind right now. Why does light go through glass and not get reflected like with metal.   I have a hypothesis and that is that the atoms are too close together in metal.   It's not so much that they are too close together but that the angle of refraction is so extremely high.   Take a diamond for example.  Did you know that you can't actually see through a diamond?  It's

A Secret of Success.

A lot of the great minds had friends they actually talked about their own fields with. My friends and I in college didn't really talk about programming. This one really smart guy would always be explaining programming and teaching others but he was a bit of a loner even though he wasn't nerdy.  I'm sure he got a really good job but imagine where he would be today if he had had a bunch of friends he talked about programming with. So many people just want to talk about other things besides their field. Einstein I bet actually talked about physics with his friends outside school. I know he had a group of guys. I know he and Maleva Merick would study together and she helped him a lot because she went to this other school where they were teaching modern stuff while Einstine's school was way behind and disagreed with all that controversial stuff and she had been exposed to.   She was his link to the stuff that really mattered and the stuff he later figured out for us.

Governing Factors

Governing factors determine the shape of things. An Islands shape is determined by what sticks out of the water but  my life's shape is determined by other factors.   One can control the shape of a tiny low island very easily.   It would take an upheaval to control the shape of a continent because so much of it sticks out of the water and much of it's coastline is cliffs.   Its hard to control the shape of a cliffy coastline.  It's changing because the cliffs often have landslides but you can't stop the landslides and only a little slides down at a time. Yet an Island that is low to the water and close to sea level can be shaped by man himself.  This is being done in the Netherlands (though it's not an island its very low land.  Netherlands means lowlands.  They are so low that some of the land is below sea level.  It's kept from being underwater by the dikes.  By building dikes they can vastly increase the land area.  The idea is that because the Netherlands

Is Quantum Theory Ptolemaic?

Quantum theory reminds me of Ptolemaic theory. They are both human-centric. They both require that all this crazy wild nutty stuff happens in the background. Neither is eloquent but like Ptolemaic Theory in it's day, Quantum Theory is the best anyone can come up with.   It's one of the few theories without a person's name attached to it.    It's as if no one wants to be associated with it.      I just say this because maybe it needs to be demystified a bit.     They did check to see if something was going on.   We know it contradicts relativity in some way but I'm not sure how.   I guess it's because relativity seems more continuous and quantum theory is so tiny.   They probably don't need to coincide because relativity is about big things and quantum theory is about very small things and in the middle we have Newton.    Maybe Newton is the missing link or the grand unification theory. So many science lectures start out with how Galileo got it right