scone

Alright, lunch today with Daryl, Nick, Aaron, Xi Wern and Lifeng was quite fun. Macdonalds, thankfully, was quite empty. Laughed quite a lot. Talked a lot of nonsense. Plus Sam Wei Yuan and what not.

But the most important thing was: Hey, Nick was actually reading up on TOE - The Theory of Everything!

Alright, I'm no expert on it, and well, my module on it was just... three lectures' worth of information, but yeah, it's pretty interesting but a whole lot of darn math is needed to just plough through Stephen's papers.

So for the benefit of Nick, here's what to read up on if you want to understand it a little better:

(1) Don't delve right into Stephen's world, you'll end up being confused. I'd rather you start with basic Quantum Mechanics, since that's what Hawking used. Then maybe you'll understand Hawking radiation more, the making of anti-particle and particle pairs.

(2) As for negative energy, don't worry. Just read up on Paul Dirac and how he solved the time dependent Schroedinger's equation and married relativity with Quantum Mechanics. Don't do the math, just get the idea. He predicted the existence of the positron!

(3) Well, I'm no expert on relativity, going to do a course on it next semester, but hey, you can handle Special Relativity, I'm sure about it. The best way to start is to go Wikipedia, and get to know what it's all about. I recommend touching on the equations themselves - then you'll realise what a genius Einstein really was in using Lorentz's equations to formulate his theory. Focus on the Lorentz's transformations. They're a beauty.

(4) Basically nothing can travel beyond the speed of light. Well, that's Einstein's postulate. You can read up on the Big Bang, and how some people (in particular, this young dashing British Physicist!) thought that the speed of light was very different ages ago! Cool stuff. But no one has verified it anyway, but it does explain loads.

(5) This however, makes the EPR paradox very weird, because it suggests instantaneous , faster-than-light motion and correspondence of information, which is beyond human logic. Alright, it stands for the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. It's really really easy to read Nick, just like, a few pages long, with hardly any equations. That's the beauty of Einstein's papers.

(6) Do go take a look at Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, and well, I think the evolution of modern day Quantum Mechanics has been quite interesting. Go read about how he argues with Einstein to his death, and how even when Schrodinger was sick, he still pestered him at his bed! Haha, funny guy. But yeah, he was the one who brought Mendeleyev's periodic table to its modern day form man! Pro guy he is.

(7) Well... Basically, Stephen Hawking really came way after Einstein, Niels Bohr, de Broglie, Werner Heisenburg or even Schrodinger. Really. Stephen's still alive! And well, deal with his predecessors first, they're essential. And oh yeah, I recommend Richard Feynman, he's a pro Quantum guy! I'll tell you more after exams, I'm quite excited about his Feynman diagrams.

(8) Heck, I'll lend you all my reference texts. It's really interesting lah! Sigh, no one appreciates it here.

Alright. And no, I won't blog about Daryl here, it's too rude. Haha. And sigh, it's a class blog, so I won't wax lyrical anymore about Science here. Heh.

Posted by yyknosekai on Thursday, November 30, 2006 at 1:44 PM | Permalink