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The passion for Research » The introduction talk by the Director of the IRFU.

The introduction talk by the Director of the IRFU.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2012 at 8:02 am and is filed under . 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.

One Response to “The introduction talk by the Director of the IRFU.”

1. Sharon says:

   December 14, 2012 at 12:18 am

   that books, as great as they are, can never be your friends. This is bucaese you cannot give your feedback to the book, you cannot participate in the conversation. I this context I’m considering you my friend and that’s why I’m calling you Matt instead prof. Strassler, and I hope this is OK with you.This is how I understand the physics science works (and this since I’ve started reading your website):-Based on the knowledge you accumulated, you have new questions and sometimes (or maybe all the time) new ideas (intuitions and insights).-Then, bucaese the language of nature is mathematics, you have to put your ideas into equations. I understand this step (finding the right equations) is difficult and it probably gives you clearer perspective on whether your idea is good or not.-Once you have your equations, or even when you’re building them, you have to make sure they extend (and not contradict) the existing proven theories, and they agree with the data from the past experiments.-Now it’s good that you have equations bucaese (pure coincidence ) the language of physicists is maths too, and the next step is to publish your work, to bring it to the community attention. Your ideas are good until someone in the community finds something flawed in them or they are contradicted by some future experiment.As a layperson, I start the same: I have some knowledge, and I read articles. Then I have more questions and my own ideas. I can see I’m not alone here bucaese people are throwing their ideas as commentaries on your website all the time. More, you say you get ideas, in form of equations, by mail, every day. Some people can put their ideas into equations. Good for them. I’m far from being able to do the same, so I put my ideas aside I am left then with my knowledge and my questions. But what do I know? Most of it is some sort of poetry combined with mental images (e.g. the image of a small ripple in a pond called Higgs field ). So I don’t know much.How about my questions? Well, I would ask, for instance, how does the Higgs filed give mass to particles? Then you would probably think the language you need to explain this (which is math) cannot satisfactory be translated into English (It’s not the same as translating from Japanese ) so you’d probably tell me you cannot explain this without using equations. Why don’t you use equations then? Probably bucaese it would take you years to take me through all the math and physics that I don’t know and you would end up realizing I might not be smart enough to understand them anyway.Still, although I love reading all your articles, the most satisfying ones for me are those that have some equations in them. Like “How did Einstein do it?” Beautiful article! I can understand (or I think I can) there how things work. I can understand how Einstein extended Newton’s theory. (I still don’t understand “How did he do it?” how did he arrive to this particular trigonometric equation.) I can even understand the hint you give in another article that the right way to look at Einstein’s equations is to use hyperbolic trigonometry.I realize how much I don’t know (and I would like to know) and it’s very frustrating

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