I just ran across an article that I need to share with you. It’s the kind of article that makes me take in a deep, deep breath and move to a higher level of understanding. I love that feeling, even though the pressure changes sometimes make my ears pop, cognitively speaking.
Nothing some cognitive chewing gum wouldn’t help.
The article is called “The Greatest Equations Ever” and it’s truly inspiring. Here’s one excerpt that I hope will lead you to read the entire piece–even if, like me, you’re neither a physicist nor a mathematician:
The unifying power of a great equation is not as simple a criterion as it sounds. A great equation does more than set out a fundamental property of the universe, delivering information like a signpost, but works hard to wrest something from nature. As Michael Berry from Bristol University once said of the Dirac equation for the electron: “Any great physical theory gives back more than is put into it, in the sense that as well as solving the problem that inspired its construction, it explains more and predicts new things” (Physics World February 1998 p38).
Great equations change the way we perceive the world. They reorchestrate the world — transforming and reintegrating our perception by redefining what belongs together with what. Light and waves. Energy and mass. Probability and position. And they do so in a way that often seems unexpected and even strange.
The deep connection for literary people like me is the power of the symbol.
My thanks to David Appel of Technology Review for blogging about this article. (Yes, of course, it was an email with links to a blog with links to a website: that’s one of the railroads I like to travel.) My thanks to Robert P. Crease for writing the article. (Short bio from the Physics World website: “Robert P. Crease is in the Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and historian at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.”) And since there’s an email link at the end of the essay, I’ll soon be writing Dr. Crease a short note of personal thanks.
Some strength for the day.
I had not heard of Dirac for years, which is to say possibly in my whole physics-poor life of learning. Then I saw him twice in a week – here, and also in an essay in the Dutch NRC Handelsblad, http://www.nrc.nl/scholieren/artikel/print/1097470718508.html, by Robbert Dijkgraf. The essay starts out by explaining that the Pirahã people of Brazil do not count beyond two, and goes on to explain the significance for abstract thought of being able to count not only up to and beyond three, but also to have and use zero and negative numbers.
Dijkgraf concludes with an anecdote about Dirac’s solution of an arithmetic problem in grade school which presaged Dirac’s “brilliant discovery of twenty years laterâ€:
“There were three fishermen…. They had caught a pile of fish. How many? Enough! In the night, one of the fishermen awoke in fear and decided to leave with his rightful portion. He crept to the pile, but saw that the haul could not honestly be divided by three. It worked, however, if he threw one fish back…. Next the second fisherman awoke. He too had to throw a fish back before he could creep away with a one-third portion. Finally, the third fisherman repeated these actions. Question: what is the smallest number of fish you can have to make this story work?
“The young Dirac answered without hesitation: Minus two.â€