You Can Be the Next Einstein

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• Preface
• Foreword
• Contents

This book was written with young people in mind.

Perhaps I should rephrase that. This book was written for people with young minds. By that, I mean people who have not yet been fully conditioned to stop thinking for themselves. That will of course include some older people, but what Max Planck, the founder of quantum mechanics, wrote (quoted above) may be applicable here…

You Can Be the Next Einstein.

What a peculiar title for a book. On the face of it, wanting to be someone else sounds like a pretty bizarre ambition. How can anyone want to be Einstein…

This book is intended for the unusual young person. Perhaps it’s you.

No. I don’t mean abnormal, or suchlike. I really don’t know what “abnormal” means, other than as a term of abuse. I don’t even mean physically different to people around you, such as having tattoos all over your body, or having one arm, or anything like that. I don’t mean having a different skin colour, family background, religion, or language, compared to people around you, either. All of those differences I would say are perfectly normal but individual to you in your own particular way. There’s nothing wrong with any of that…

Before I go on further in this book, there’s a few questions I should address about mathematical physics as a career.

It’s all very well me suggesting that you think seriously about mathematical physics as a career, but I imagine you don’t have much of an idea what being a mathematical physicist means. In other words, what is it exactly that mathematical physicists do all day…

The title of this chapter is a Latin saying. Latin is a dead language, so does that mean this saying is a bit out of date?

I don’t think so. Those ancient Romans were pretty smart people. They experienced many of the issues that we have today. They found that sayings, mottoes, and proverbs were a good way of reminding themselves about those issues, about how they solved them, or ran away from them. We still do that, because we have all of the same issues that they had, plus a few more, I’m sure. Whilst this motto is expressed in a language that dominated Europe for over two thousand years, its significance to us dates from about 1660, when the Royal Society of London was founded…

The following sections are included:

• Didn’t mathematical physicists invent atom bombs?
  • The Letter
• Justification?
  • The Quark Bomb

One of the things I’ve noticed over the years about people is how often they do things for no apparently sensible reason.

By no apparently sensible reason, I mean doing something that is perhaps hard or even dangerous, for no obvious personal reward, when it might seem more logical not to do it. For example, why do fire officers risk their lives going into a burning building when everyone else is running out? Why does an athlete train for the Olympics without taking drugs, even though they know some of their competitors are almost certainly doing so…

Life is full of little incidents, each of which may have lifetime consequences. I never intended to be a mathematical physicist. At school I developed a passionate interest in astronomy, to the extent that when it came to deciding on a university degree, I chose Astrophysics…

We come now to the hard part. You may be no good at maths.

Or so you have been told, or even believe about yourself. Nonsense. I’ll prove it to you. If you can read, you can do maths of enormous depth and value, as I’ll show in this chapter…

Even before he died, some people assumed that Einstein’s brain had some special features that made him exceptional. It’s not surprising, therefore, that just after he died in 1955, his brain was removed and has been studied and discussed ever since, amidst controversy…

In the next theme, Practicalities, after this chapter, I go over just that: the actual becoming, and practice of being, a mathematical physicist. Those chapters are based on the assumption that you have been enticed by my sales pitch for the subject and are considering finding out more about the discipline…

In this chapter, I discuss studying and the crucial importance of getting a good night’s sleep. If you’re a student, it won’t be much use to you if you get that sleep during an exam. If you’re a mathematical physicist, a good night’s sleep will help concentration and creativity.

This chapter may come across as tedious and stating many obvious points. However, I could not avoid including it in this book. Whilst to me being a mathematical physicist is more of a way of life rather than just a job, it’s useful to think of it from a practical point of view. I mean, a plumber who didn’t have a set of tools would be helpless, and an artist who had no paint would be hopeless. It’s no different being a mathematical physicist. The conceptual problems that you deal with in mathematical physics are hard enough: you don’t want to be distracted by relatively inessential factors such as having nothing to write with, or running out of paper. You simply have to gear up properly before you start theorizing. Here are a few pointers that I have found useful in my time.

Perhaps I’ve convinced you to consider becoming a mathematical physicist. I discuss motivation, writing, conferences, tools of the trade and suchlike in other chapters. In this chapter, I want to discuss some practical aspects of doing mathematical physics on a daily basis.

Sooner or later, anyone passing through school or university will be asked to give a talk to a group of people. It could be to report on a project that they’ve been working on for months, or an unusual and difficult interest of theirs, such as listening to music or watching football…

Sooner or later, you will go job seeking. There are three important reasons for getting a job.

Interviews are one of those experiences that we all have to undergo in order to get accepted for jobs, degree courses, and social clubs. In the following, I’ll talk about interviews as if they were all for jobs…

In this chapter, I discuss some incidents that involve sitting at the back of a class or lecture room. Each of them has some thing to say about the way lectures and seminars play a role in mathematical physics…

This chapter is all about administrators. You might have thought that that topic would have nothing to do with being a mathematical physicist. Don’t be too sure…

This chapter is about something all mathematical physicists need to do as a matter of routine, which is publish scientific papers and books. If you want to become a mathematical physicist, or any other sort of scientist or mathematician for that matter, you will have to attend to this activity…

I think Nikola Tesla must have had a time machine. What he wrote in 1934, quoted above, perfectly encapsulates some big issues in current mathematical physics…

In Chapter 10 (No Good at Maths? ), I referred to symbols in mathematics. I said there that symbols are marks on paper that convey a message. Actually, they are much more than that. In the language and philosophy of Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory fame, symbols are part of a non-verbal, unwritten contract, a social convention if you will, between two sorts of people who may perhaps have never met, or even have had no possibility of ever meeting. Let’s call them senders and receivers. A sender makes marks on paper or other media such as clay tablets, stone, or electronic files. Later (and it is always later), a receiver (or in the case of widely distributed documents such as newspapers, books, and the internet, receivers) looks at those marks and tries to make sense of them. Those marks are the symbols that I’m discussing here…

If you’ve reached this point in my book, it’s possible you will be thinking about which sort of mathematical physicist you would like to be. That’s a critically important point to think about, as it may determine the course of the rest of your life…

In this chapter, the various terms such as postdoc, boondoggle, and realism will be explained.

This chapter contains the commentary notes of 'Terms' with superscript numbering in chapter 1 to 24.

The following sections are included:

• Bibliography
• Index