Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a physicist.
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2023[edit]
It is an interesting question as to who inspires us in physics. Here is a list of 20th century giants whose work inspired me that might work as protagonists with interesting stories that deserve to be considered along with the best known Einstein/Hawking/Oppenheimer/Etc.:
CN Yang (with Lee and Simons)
Paul Dirac
Ernst Stueckelberg
Madame Wu
David Bohm
Abdus Salam
Ken Wilson
Emmy Noether
Ettore Majorana
Carlo Rubio
Shin'ichirĹ Tomonaga
Lev Landau
Simon Van der Meer
Freeman Dyson
Julian Schwinger
Paul Ehrenfest
John VonNeumann
Feza Gursey
Wolfgang Pauli
Louis and Edward Witten
Hans Bethe
George Sudarshan
Vera Rubin
Gerard 't Hooft
Not all of those stories areâŚuhâŚsimple.
Would be curious to hear names from others.
i was hoping that the oppenheimer movie would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists but it really missed the mark on that.
let's get that movie made!
(i think the social network managed to do this for startup founders.)
But letâs face facts: inspiration is not the issue. Fundamental Physics needs to be a good life. What is holding us back is:
A) Terrible Pay.
B) Worse Odds of Survival
C) Decoupling of Success at Physics from Success in Physics
D) The Matthew Effect.
E) Math and Physics Pricks
F) Tyranny of large programs over individuals.
G) Multi Decade Stagnation
H) Un Scientific And even Anti-scientific behavior.
I) The Matilde Effect
J) The Sudarshan Effect
K) Ethics Collapse
L) Needlessly long pedagogical sequence (e.g. intro physics -> Classical Mechanics -> Grad Classical Mechanics -> Symplectic Geometry) driven by history.
M) Socializing physics into a team sport in areas dominated by individuals and iconoclasts.
N) Tolerance for Program level failure (e.g. *obsessive* use of toy model physics to evade a reckoning).
O) Intolerance for individual error and failure by those in programs.
P) Failure to reward early contributions (e.g. *Abelian* Chern Simons QFT).
Q) Atrocious MSM journalism distorting the public understanding.
R) Relentless discussion of woo physics in public and 3-5 real topics (e.g. somebodies cat).
S) Learned Helplessness coming from over-learning Ken Wilson.
T) Inability to support motherhood of female physicists.
U) Inability to keep physics marriages easily together with jobs.
V) DEI loyalty oaths and loss of autonomy.
W) Flooding of markets with disposable labor and abuse apprenticeship as labor.
X) Kicking up on attribution.
Y) Overpaying for cherry topping.
Z) Fetishizing the quantum when innovation in classical field theory remains the heart of QFT.
But lastly, if outsiders want to fund and fix movies, you will find that going to the âLeading physicistsâ wonât work. Peer review canât work when the leadership *is* the problem. You get more failure.
You need to hold meetings where you get disagreement. So choose the leaders and iconoclasts with great care. Patrick Collison isnât terrible at this. B+. Best I have ever seen. Start there. Good luck. đ
So you have my list. It is incomplete and idiosyncratic. Iâd love to have your corrections and additions.
SoâŚ.Where is yours? Thanks again.
2024[edit]
This is what is blocking progress in my opinion for physics to go beyond Einstein and General Relativity.
40 years ago, the leaders of physics started claiming that gravity had to be quantized to be compatible with the Standard Model.
But the incompatibility is *not* Quantum vs Classical field theory. The *classical* field theory of the Standard Model is already not compatible with classical General Relativity.
General Relativity, at least as it is now, simply cannot be gauged so as to make it a true gauge theory, because Gauge transformation does *not* commute with the Ricci Contractions used in the field equations, and within the Einstein Hilbert action.
I wish I deserved the heretic moniker, but isnât asking whether spacetime is quantum or classical just common sense? After all, general relativity (GR) - our theory of gravity and spacetime - is special. It isnât a gauge theory, and gravity isnât a force. 1/
For some reasons that have never been explained or justified leaders in physics started making the claim that GR *was* also a gauge theory. This was done by claiming that general coordinate invariance in the form of the diffeomorphism group is a kind of Gauge Transformation. Which it clearly is not.
This is absurd. Gauge transformations move the fibers and are defined not to move space time where as diffeomorphisms move space time directly.
So: why claim that GR is a kind of gauge theory? The only payoff I see is that this allows us to pretend that the SM vs GR incompatibility is classical vs quantum where it is staring us in the face that it is instead contraction-based (GR) vs Gauge Transformed (SM).
The only reason this is at all controversial is that the people saying it were thought to be the leaders 40 years ago.
That didnât work out. We have 40 years lost as a result.
But the truth is anyone can see the incompatibility between gravity and gauge theory if they are not being told that gravity is a special kind of gauge theory. Which it absolutely is not as formulated by Grossman, Einstein and Hilbert.
Moral: The problem holding us back from a Theory of everything is **Classical**, and not Quantum. The quantum comes as desert after classical compatibility. Itâs not the main issue. A red hearing that throws us off following the scent. Itâs a distraction that should have fooled almost no one who was thinking for his or her self.