Re: OT: If you could spend an hour with someone, dead or alive. someone who could not lie...

Historical short-circuit: "Potsdam" should have been "Yalta".

Uh, yeah, I do understand General Relativity. My undergraduate degree was in Physics (with a double major in Math). 'Course that was before all this new fangled s*it got popular - like quantum mechanics and string theory.

"HeyBub" wrote

Doncha know?? It is a new age religion now.

Hmm. It does have at least one advantage over NAR: it's given rise to miracles that can be produced (and reproduced) by 'ordinary' folks...

So says this non-physicist with a patent in the mill for a method of absorbing 99.99999% of incident solar radiation in a concentrating collector (I got tired of having to wear welding goggles to protect my eyes). :)

RE: Subject

Since this is a wood working forum, Norm.

Lew

Must be some school you went to where they have an undergraduate course in General Relativity. At most schools they can't get enough math into the student until the second year of grad school.

I didn't pick up on something in my first reply--you got your physics degree before _quantum_ _mechanics_? And yet you got an undergraduate General Relativity course? Something is very wrong with this picture.

Nothing wrong with the picture at all ... CLEARLY stated "_before_" it got popular.

We topologists can do math standing on our heads.

Humpf! Even Einstein said 'God does not throw dice!'

Yeah, but you can't tell the difference between a doughnut and a coffee cup.

Which has what bearing on the point in question?

Actually, the exact quote was:

"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the 'old one'. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."

And regardless of the quote, Einstein didn't believe in a personal god.

HeyBub wrote: : J. Clarke wrote: :>>

:>> Thanks for the correction. He WAS 26 when he wrote the paper that :>> eventually earned him a Nobel Prize. General Relativity, however, was :>> merely a generalized case of Special Relativity which he also :>> published at 26. :>

:> You really don't grasp General Relativity if you believe it to be :> "merely" _anything_. General Relativity, while it reduces to Special :> Relativity for one case and to Newtonian Mechanics for another, was :> pretty much a rewriting of the whole of physics. :>

: Uh, yeah, I do understand General Relativity. My undergraduate degree was in : Physics (with a double major in Math). 'Course that was before all this new : fangled s*it got popular - like quantum mechanics and string theory.

Hmm. QM got popular sometime around eighty years ago, didn't it? You're older than one would have thought.

-- Andy Barss

Way too many interesting humans to spend an hour with. I don't know if I'd really waste my one hour on this, but I'd like to hear what Lee Harvey Oswald would have to say.

F**k, that wasn't Ted, damn.

Yep, late '20s to early '30s. Not sure when it became a standard part of the undergraduate physics curriculum--it was in the late '60s though, at which time General Relativity wasn't all that common even in graduate physics programs.

I have that double degree - and watched the industry and fellows in research - I was to be in High energy research but my beloved mother was passing away so I went by the low road.

Particles were in the primary ones and not the fancy ones - and we had fewer elements as well. Atomic physics was different than today. I was taught by a Manhattan experiment PhD. As he put it, he was a technician.

Some things were sorted out - but the massive amount of particles discovered and elements was interesting.

I was able to deal with near field radiation when others had no idea and many continue.

Mart> J. Clarke wrote: