My dad is constantly bugging me to put all of my conversation that I have for him on my blog. It is because in person, he hates to talk about the things that I’m learning in all of the scientific writings that I read. I don’t care who gets this stuff or who doesn’t… I am going to rant and scream to the world how incredible this stuff is.

First of all, the book I am currently reading is a collection of physics lectures written by Richard Feynman. He was a big physicist in the 50s and 60s and I’m pretty sure he went to all teaching until he died in 1988.¬†His writing is magnificent. The only thing that you really need to know before you read this book is some basic calculus and some Euclidean geometry.

It starts out talking about a lot of mathematics involved in classical¬†mechanics. Classical mechanics is just Newtonian physics… the boring stuff… force, kinetic energy, momentum, acceleration, all of that classic stuff dealing with bodies in motion through space. If there are any of you out there that think those types of things are what physics I’m going to be studying in college are, you are mistaken. Although these are the basic mechanics to what I’ll be doing, and an important part in the learning process, it is only the beginning.

In Einstein’s time and just before, physics was entering a revolution, where electricity and magnetism were starting to be known as a large part of modern physics. All kinds of men made incredible contributions to science in those days… and they were all brilliant. Luckily for Einstein, he was coming up at just the right time when all of the equtions he needed to answer the things he’d been dreaming up were being born. Things such as the Lorentz Transformation and so on. A famous experiment called the Michelson and Morley Experiment had just been conducted.

It’s as if God was pushing Einstein right up to the top of modern science. He had been dreaming about principles of relativity since he was 16. He failed his last final in college, which would have led him into electrical engineering. Instead he was stuck in a patent office all day in Switzerland doing nothing, but dreaming up the ideas that would change the world of science and technology as we knew it. The basic principles of relativity were starting to form, but nobody really saw it coming until he came in and BAM! Like magic, he put all of it together.

I was excited last night and earlier this evening about the things I’d been reading. I knew Einstein’s theories of relativity about how it changed our views on space… and then I also knew about his famous equation which states that mass is proportional to energy. Tonight Feynman finally pulled it all together for me, and I understand how the two connect now. I also learned a bit of vector analysis which was a really cool form of math which was composed of a little basic calculus, basic algebra, and some Euclidean geometry, but when they were put together, it will make your head spin at first. It was really exciting as I grasped it all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 at 3:14 am and is filed under Books, Humor, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.