I’ve read Kip Thorne since the mid 2000s. He’s a hell of a lecturer, and a smart guy.
2 Likes
I do wish I’d met him. I did get to meet John Wheeler though at UT shortly before he passed. It would have been amazing to live in the heyday of the Standard Model! On the other hand, my specialty is quantum computing, which could very well be the next Bletchley Park (fingers crossed).
2 Likes
Hey, the worst thing you can say about it is that it’s useful, but not in the situation at hand… So it’s still useful. And at best, it’s kind of like the greatest simulation software ever. As I understand it.
2 Likes
The cool thing is that we know the math works. My area of study is quantum algorithms, but if the engineering boys and girls in building C can overcome the decoherence problem, ideally the future is a quantum co-processor in every machine.
Funny you should mention. One of the reasons I intially started down this path is becuse I realized we had three possible ways to test some of the predictions of various quantum gravity candidates: cosmology, build a linear particle accelerator out of asteroids and string them across the solar system (not anytime soon), or what some people like to call a universal quantum simulator 
I figure if I can contribute some small effort to a tool to unravel the so-call Theory of Everything, that’s a good enough thing to have on my grave stone.
3 Likes
I’m a big fan of math. I sucked at it as a kid, so I decided to work to make it the strongest plate in my armor. The same thing happened with first aid in Scouting.
4 Likes
I keep a first aid kit in our house in both our vehicles with the items the online lists say you should have in them, but honestly I’d be a little lost if I had to administer anything beyond cleaning and wrapping a shallow wound (that seemed the bare minimum for someone who likes camping as much as I do). I really need to take a proper first aid course.
3 Likes
You have reminded me of a lullaby I used to sing to the Doktorling Sonja when she was still a babe-in-arms, starting “Oh Dear, What can Dark Matter Be?”, where the end of every second verse was “And that’s why black holes have no hair”.
3 Likes
I once worked with a guy who’d left a PhD physics program after completing his master’s thesis. (I know, I know, for shame. He knows this, too.) His undergrad was a B.S. in mathematics. He said that during that first year, the math majors grokked the material much more quickly than the physics majors. His conclusion was that the mathematicians had something better than just a theoretical framework: they spoke its language.
Last I checked in with him, he was off to Carnegie Mellon to build robots.
3 Likes
I’ve a few etchings you might like to see…
1 Like
IANAP either but one thing that’s been made abundantly clear to me is that in that realm, intuition utterly fails us.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
