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Loved this part. They are pretty much the same :)
I use to frequent a grad student bar that regularly held an open-mic night for people to practice their defense. It was brutal. A room full of drunk grad and post-grads would try and pick apart your presentation. Targeted academic heckling. It was great. The goal was to get over your fear of the whole process -no matter what, your actual defense would be a better experience.
You spend months/years hitting these clubs to test and refine a bit, while developing all the skills. Some audience make a sport of the heckling, especially some of the other aspiring comedians.
(She said the worst hecklers were the drunk fratbros who imagined themselves comedians, and their own bits were the kind that only their friends would think were funny, but they sure would be demanding of others.)
It was good practice, but brutal, especially if you're weary from living poor, and hanging in there while trying to make it in LA.
Lots of parallels with grad school.
>>> he still had difficulty with it! And again, when Bohr pointed out the error, it led to emotional difficulties for Heisenberg. This resonates with me deeply - knowledge that I "should" have known but are shamed for not knowing become massively harder to learn. I think I somehow label that area as "not part of my identity" and so if I need to learn it Indont have an intellectual challenge I have to resolve past tra…
> We need to be kinder to ourselves. Everyone else needs to be kinder to themselves. I, on the other hand, am a worthless piece of shit who deserves no kindness. Resolving that obvious hypocrisy would require me to accept that I'm "not special"; see, singling myself out as the sole human being who deserves to hate themselves keeps me in a special category. You already mentioned the real problem: > identity Yup, there…
One of my favourite positive doctoral viva stories was Wittgenstein, who presented "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" as his dissertation, which had already been published and was already considered a masterpiece. The report was something like "We consider the work of Mr Wittgenstein to be the work of a genius. Nevertheless, it fulfills the criteria for a Cambridge doctorate". Edit to add: The actual quote (which I jus…
Very funny to me that on the way out of the room Wittgenstein allegedly "clapped the two examiners [Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore] on the shoulder and said, 'Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it.'"
Having just finished the epic Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, my mind goes to a different place —- Heisenberg was at the core of the German bomb project. Speculatively, I wonder how things might have gone a different way had he been required to be a brilliant experimentalist too. Success versus failure hinged on nitty-gritty experimental details, not on sweeping theoretical insight. Probably not, but the…
You might also like Now it Can Be Told: the Story of the Manhattan Project by Leslie R. Groves I thought it did a good job at talking about how the Army made everything happen.
As a physicist i find this quite comforting. It's good to keep in mind that even the most transformative thinkers in the history of science had reasons to experience impostor syndrome. Einstein famously had a lot of trouble with math as well. No matter how good you are, physics will regularly present you with problems that you can't solve. Statistically speaking, most of the time spent doing science is spent being wr…
This is false.
As a physicist i find this quite comforting. It's good to keep in mind that even the most transformative thinkers in the history of science had reasons to experience impostor syndrome. Einstein famously had a lot of trouble with math as well. No matter how good you are, physics will regularly present you with problems that you can't solve. Statistically speaking, most of the time spent doing science is spent being wr…
> Einstein famously had a lot of trouble with math as well. Isn't it a myth? http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288...
“Every boy in the streets of Göttingen understands more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein. Yet, in spite of that, Einstein did the work and not the mathematicians.”
Let's have some fun. Here's a basic special relativity problem from John R. Taylor's Classical Mechanics . A space explorer A sets off at a steady 0.95 c to a distant star. After exploring the star for a short time, he returns at the same speed and gets home after a total absence of 80 years (as measured by earth-bound observers.) How long do A's clocks say that he was gone, and by how much has he aged as compared to…
ChatGPT says: The time dilation formula tells us that the time experienced by a moving clock will appear slower to a stationary observer by a factor of $\gamma$, where $\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - v^2/c^2}}$ and $v$ is the speed of the moving clock and $c$ is the speed of light. In this case, the speed of the space explorer's rocket is 0.95c, so $\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - 0.95^2}} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{0.0025}} \approx…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meaning that he happened to work on something that had widespread effect, he didn’t plan for it. It was luck that quantum mechanics was so successful
I think it is clear that Heisenberg, Sommerfeld, Born and others at the forefront of theoretical physics at the time were well aware of how important and far-reaching the issues that comprised Heisenberg's real work were. As explained in the article, his diversion into hydrodynamics was purely to secure a doctorate from a physics establishment which had not yet caught up to this fact, and I would say that, if anythin…
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