Math is just a skill, like any other and not
everyone can do it. What gets my goat is the "anyone can do anything if
only they try hard enough "attitude. No, they can't. Some people are good
at certain skills and not other, and others have different skills. I happen to
be good at math. I get annoyed when people say "Ooh, you must be so
clever!" when I tell them. No - I just have that particular skill - I can
no doubt be as dumb as the next person at something else. As Courtney Barnett
puts it: "The ambulance driver
thinks I'm clever 'cos I play guitar /I think she's clever 'cos she stops
people dying." Laughing at general illiteracy isn't so funny, because
that is a relatively simple skill that most of us can learn, and it hurts
people not to have it; but Quantum Mechanics? Come on, no one groks it, and it really doesn't
matter for most of us.
The innumeracy and scientific illiteracy that
is being normalised is part of the social environment which enables a powerful
minority to continue to dominate and exploit a majority by ensuring that as few
people as possible have the necessary logical skills and knowledge to seriously
question the stories they are told about the world. Accepting this kind of
thing as "humour" is accepting a narrative which says that math and
science are things that only a tiny number of geeky people care about or
understand on account of its alleged "difficulty" and irrelevance.
It's all part and parcel of the maintenance of power. In truth, math and
science are not that hard until they get to work on us school to persuade us
that they are. They also get to work on suppressing our creativity. There's
nothing funny about this at all. Mass literacy has been accepted as a necessary
evil and it's no longer acceptable to be proud of illiteracy.
Why aren’t more kids learning Physics? It has
to be a combination of teaching methods and the way physics is stereotyped in
the media. Physics is an absolutely fascinating subject. It's about
understanding the very fabric of reality. What could be more interesting than
that? It depresses me that most people seem to see the subject as being dry and
dull. It really isn't. On top of that, people who study physics have to do it
because they love physics, and many people do love it. However, there is
virtually no prospect of future employment in the field in Portugal.
A lot of physics at degree level can be
downright dull IF NOT TAUGHT RIGHT. You really have to be interested in why
things are the way they are from an early age to circumvent that, and I find it
hard to believe that gawking at Carl Sagan (the one I grew up with) on the
telly is going to make that happen. I can't remember having role models as such
- I just loved taking things like hifi, toasters, phones and bikes to bits to
see what made them tick (or to see if they'd worked when I'd put them back
together...), and finding math equations extraordinarily beautiful. Yes,
there's the sexy stuff like astrophysics (relatively easy as much of it was qualitative
when I studied it), but to have even the barest of a good all-round grasp of
physics as a whole, you have to have done the fairly sophisticated mathematical
groundwork, get your head around such utterly scintillating concepts like
statistical mechanics, thermodynamics and Fourier optics, before you can set
the world alight with your re-jigged theory of quantum gravity (which I did
study after I finished my Computer Science college degree).
Moving in a little closer to the book’s
content. His explanation of the Lagrangean is something I've never seen done
this way before. We have determined experimentally that we can represent very
generally the laws of physics by deriving them from a condition which states
that a certain quantity (called the Action) must be kept minimum. The action is
differently defined for each system, but always represented as the integral
between two points in time of another quantity (Called the "Lagrangean
Quantity") that is a function of position and velocity at any point in
time. Since the action must be kept minimum, the derivative of it (with respect
to position) must be kept 0. Both position and velocity are considered to
change with respect to time. As such, we can write:
dAction/dx = d/dt(dLagrangean/dv)-dLagrangean/dx
= 0 (Euler-Lagrange Equation)
By selecting the Lagrangean function to equal KE-PE,
the above equation derives Newton's 2nd law of motion. Brilliant. Moreover, the
lagrangean's form can be changed in order to change coordinate system. By doing
so first and then solving the Euler-Lagrange equation, the laws of motion for
even Non-Inertial Reference Frames can be readily computed (as long as they are
non-relativistic), such as in a circularly moving Reference frame. Like so,
fictitious forces (those observed in NIRFs but not in IRFs) can be calculated,
such as the Coriolis force.
[Paraphrased] "There are some things you
only want to experience once, like a book. You don't want to read the same
thing over and over again. But there are other things, like music, that you'll
want to listen to continually because it just feels good. I hope my lectures
are like that... (Paraphrased)." Why yes, Professor Susskind, the lectures
in your book are a treasure to read.
I have never seen some of these topics
explained with so much clarity. He is one of the greatest teacher in physics,
and I admire his effort to go through all of physics for the benefit of
beginning students. It is a great contribution to the field as a whole, and
hopefully some of his readers will become future physics stars thanks to this,
just like the Feynman lectures. Incidentally, I had a Professor in college, José Maria Quadros e Costa, who
approached Physics in just the same manner Prof. Susskind does, i.e., from
first principles. One can never over emphasize the basics. This is what
separates great teachers from ordinary ones. I find that a lot of the students
brush through the basics and find later that they do not have a deep
understanding. The concepts of state/phase space is a good example of this;
they’re actually not as simple and are so critical in understanding a lot of
the world, and they’re worth spending some time on.
Bottom-line: Everyone knows leptons live in
Alentejo and spend their lives looking for crocks of gold at the end of
rainbows. However, I concede that without scientific discoveries, mathematics,
physics and books like these, we'd be explaining the universe in myth and
legend.
