Chirality

[studiot]

I prefer to try and understand the accepted science first, before making speculative assertions, as I've always thought you'd be able to see farther by standing on the shoulders of others ( recognise the quote ?? ) rather than jumping up while standing behind them

 

I like it

 

+1

[Ronald Hyde]

I have thae Pais book ( Subtle is the Lord... ), along with several others on Einstein's life and carreer.

I also don't see well ( almost no vision in left eye ) due to PDS glaucoma in my middle 30s, filtering operations and subsequent cataract operations. Driving at night or in bad weather is an adventure, and I now read fine print with a magnifying glass.

The math professor who called Einstein a lazy dog was none other than Hermann Minkowsky.

Planck's introduction of quantization was an ' act of desperation ', a fudge factor if you will, since he couldn't make his equations make sense ( infinite energy as frequency approaches infinity ) without it. He was not influenced by anyone or any prize.

I prefer to try and understand the accepted science first, before making speculative assertions, as I've always thought you'd be able to see farther by standing on the shoulders of others ( recognise the quote ?? ) rather than jumping up while standing behind them.

There is so much irony and humor in what you have said. Maybe I'll get a magnifying glass and read the entire book. I knew about the act of desperation.

 

What I do when I read a book about science, or most any subject. I try to understand everything in it, and after I've done that, I figuratively 'throw it out'

and rethink every argument, assertion, anything that involves reasoning, completely by myself. If someone explains some everyday event to me and gives

'their interpretation' I will almost to the point of rudeness, say 'just tell me what happened, let me figure it out'. I have learned that so many people

do not have good reasoning abilities. I think it's mostly because they include an element of wishful thinking. And do you know who's reasoning I am most

careful to test? Mine! If I make an argument, I do everything possible to falsify it. And when I am thinking through things I have an 'imaginary friend' that

I am explaining them to. In other words, I think it as I would explain it to others and this helps me to see it better.

 

There was a place in the Feynman biography 'Genius' where at Princeton he was 'sitting with the Mathematicians'. Around here if you propose something in

anyway different than the 'accepted dogma', yeah I know cranks use that phrase a lot, you get a warm reception, to say the least. But if I proposed something

to a real life Mathematician he would just ask me a polite series of questions. For how many values of you tested it, have you looked for counterexamples,

that sort of things, it would be placed in a category or discarded, he would give me a perfectly good reason for discarding it if that were the case. So very, very

much better than the Physics people. In that book also his wife explained why he quit the APS. He just didn't like the way those people behaved. Maybe two people

would write an inane paper, and three others would 'prove' that paper was wrong. One of the inventor-physicists I know quit the academic side because he didn't like the

way they treated other people. Highly successful, multimillionaire, one of the nicest, kindest people you could ever meet.

 

And I tell people, when you look at the outside world, it's this big huge thing that goes on for billions of light years, but when you're dealing with

other people in a small community, it's a very small world, and anything bad or evil that you may do, for whatever reason, my come back to bite you.

Edited September 25, 2012 by Ronald Hyde