Ground Rules

...the premises for this web site.

This is elaboration on the Nullis in verba theme and other stylistic aspects of my Main Sequence web pages. As such it is rather dull but I include this digressive page anyway for personal reasons.

First: In my view the most valuable thing at this website is the list of books in the Bibliography.

Furthermore...
...the material in these web pages is free-form narrative.
...it is not a pedagogical foundation nor instruction in fundamentals.
...it is intended as examination of ideas one might find in the course of a traditional formal education.

Truth be told if I could write a book I would write Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Fortunately Timothy Ferris has already done this so what I'm writing here is not that book... but what I write is inspired by his seemingly effortless narrative summary of our picture of how things are. (So thanks, Dr. Ferris.)

Motivation
While working on these pages I am trying to compile a list of the conundrums I find interesting. The ground floor motivation as stated on the home page is that the subject matter is so vast and complex and interesting that it would be a pity not to try and get to the bottom of some of it. I've found when one is at the bottom of this vast landscape of learning curves that terminology tends to float down from on high, quite frequently. Good examples are "gauge symmetry" and "confinement" and "Higgs boson". In order to get to these subjects I will need to know more about what they are prima facia to care about learning them. Which means I have to want to learn about the standard model. So I'll need to feel reasonably happy with QFT and QED. Which means I'll have wave mechanics and matrix mechancis down pretty well. Which rests upon Bohr's groundwork around 1913. And so on back to Planck. So as I write this I'm looking at a paper resting on my desk by A. Einstein, in English translation entitled "On a Heuristic Point of View about the Creation and Conversion of Light". I get to try and figure this paper out. I'm a happy camper.

Form
I tend to alternate between three voices: First person singular, first person plural, and narrative. I'm trying to stick with first person singular mostly to reflect my sense of exploration. Shifting to "We think thus and so" is more pedantic and easier to write and correspondingly (I imagine) less engaging to read. Narrative is convenient for summarizing things that I don't have time to investigate. For example I can't personally go back in time and ask Bohr about various influences; alas I have to take the historians at their word.

The Conceit
The conceit I make use of sometimes is: 'I don't already know the answer/result for a given question or experiment...' even though of course the work has in fact been done, exhaustively.  This is to underscore the fact that:
I don't already know the answer, really!

Okay, it's epistemology or self-deception but knowing because somebody tells me is not as convincing as knowing because I have some firsthand reasons to know. For example I don't know from direct experience that electrons exist. I know something hurt like hell when I jammed a bobby-pin into a power outlet, and I know a lot of people accept electrons as real. But why should I? Not to mention that Dirac's equation for electrons is a lot more complex than my personal equation for electrons ("Don't jam bobby pins into power outlets.") So if I want to understand electrons at Dirac's level then I think I'd better start out from what I know and be prepared to work my way up by direct experience as much as possible. Progress so far: Some damn thing keeps making long thin spider-webby tracks in my cloud chamber.

More basic things: How can I convince myself that the world is round?  I really think I ought to do this (without invoking Apollo 9 photography or the hapless Ferdinand Magellan; someone could be putting one over on me!) In this Age of Information there is not enough time to build all our knowledge firsthand, granted there's just too much of it, but I'm determined to do at least a little. Practically speaking the stuff in books is handy, I confess. My real game plan is to mix experiments with the answers found in books. This brings me to a little further digression on the education process.

"It turns out that..."
Physics and math are indeed so complex that a certain amount of short-cutting is done in the usual education process. One might hear the phrase "It turns out that..." preceding a really important idea or result. This happens particularly in physics, particularly if you go to college and they have to teach you a whole lot in a short time, particularly if you go to Caltech.  There are a lot of mottos inscribed on various lintels and arches at Caltech; personally I think they ought to add the Latin phrase for 'It turns out that...' This phrase is a convenient gloss-over, an unfortunate and yet a necessary piece of shorthand. It might translate verbosely as

"There is a lot of background here that is not germaine to my principle point and as I do not have time to go into it I will ask you to accept rather on faith the following result:..."

And so 'It turns out that...' has become a red flag for me. Any time I hear it (or heaven forbid say it myself!) I think "Aha! There's another man behind the curtain to go investigate!"

Even when "It turns out that.." is eschewed in favor of more detail, brevity is still the soul of the matter. For example consider the typical presentation on the Michelson-Morley interferometer. Unless the physics faculty have made time to build one, this very important null-result experiment will typically be described in the classroom using a diagram and one or two sentences describing the setup. Then the null result is given. And then the startling conclusion there there is no such thing as a preferred reference frame. All this might take up a lecture, or less. Maybe ten minutes if they're in a hurry to get to the consequences!

This is not a bad thing. It's just that if you happen to be a slow learner like me, the implication, the weight of the matter goes whipping past before it can be digested. Sort of like an astronaut trying to drink lunch out of a firehouse... it's not pretty no matter what your reference frame. Anyway this subject of learning is very important to me. Learning by chalkboard derivation is about 10th on my effective methods list. First on this list is "Teach it to somebody else" and a close second is "Build the experiment myself." By doing experiments I benefit from:
Missing out on this fun is fine if I never need to visit the subject again... but then why go there in the first place?  No, no, no, that will never do.  So to summarize the conceit of pretending to not know:
Upside-down Pyramids and other Flippable Paragons and Paradigms
A final note on learning: R.P.Burn in the introduction to his fine book A Pathway Into Number Theory remarks that the usual method of presentation in math books--definition, theorem, problems--is backwards from how we learn. The entire book reverses the order to great effect; its basically a whole bunch of interactive lessons or exercises that ramp the reader up to the points of the chapter. I find this extremely appealing because it gets the pencil moving in my hand. Another of my deficiencies is an inability to think without writing.

Similarly consider the structure of a University, a pyramid from the undergraduates to grad students to various types of faculty to administrators and Deans and Regents and the President. There is a degree of reverence or hierarchy inherent in this pyramid, owing to the increasing degrees of knowledge and perhaps influence.  The pyramid can be flipped upside-down to make the undergraduates the most important component... except that above them are high school students, then middle school, then elementary, then little kids, then infants. Maybe there is some value to be found in inverting the pyramid in order to re-think everyone's place in this culture. Maybe the idea of importance is too multi-faceted to simplify in this manner. The idea here is really just a philosophical construct related to our cultural ability to educate ourselves.

Intended Audience
I suppose my intended audience is me, or myself around age 17 or so. I have a few other people in mind while writing these pages, particularly the Augenblick sitting in the swing.

That said, off I go back to the start of the Main Sequence, Cosmic Rays!

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