Granola street-rubbish photographer feels insecure about GR.
Coffee shop GR
On a few occasions I have had some physics discussions in the local coffee shops. We touch on topics like relativity and I have mentioned that I have actually studied GR (general relativity) and worked through by hand most of the difficult tensor formulas, such as the Bianchi identity, for example. Now computer algebra packages can work through many of the grunt tensor calculations, which can get tedious. (They were so tedious that Einstein invented a special notation, called the Einstein summation convention.) Any way students are often present and often they react as “ooooh, aaaah – wow, he gets relativity”. And actually indeed this is somewhat impressive, and it is nice that many people react this way. If you think GR is easy, try working through some of the tensor gravity formulas! And this is good stuff to know. I am definitely interested in this material. There are coffee shop regulars who will call you a super genius if you know this stuff, and this is nice, too. The support goes a long way. (I have been called a lot of other things, and some not so nice.) You can get some respect around here for knowing some of this stuff.
Indian restaurant GR
When I first moved to Madison I walked around taking pictures. (I still do this). A fellow had the same camera and we started talking, and after a short while I learned that he was a physics major, who was doing his Ph.D. and who had also earned a masters degree in physics from Cambridge in England. Well, ok.
We agreed to have dinner and had dinner at a nice Indian restaurant on State Street, and we talked physics. His Ph.D. work involves applying a martingale technique to image estimation and reconstruction problems in astronomical imaging. (He found some nice things including a new algorithm for dramatic computational complexity improvement for some restoration problems.) After that we went over to the Memorial Library, got a library booth, and he worked through the notions of GR in around 30 minutes and pointed out some interesting things he had found. He asked me to review his paper called something like “Notes on General Relativity” but I do not know how to do Lie derivatives (yet), so I said no.
I’m some guy who moves to Madison after doing some c-language debugging for manufacturing robotics and other things in Silicon Valley; and there is no interest in this physics in industry. So it was neat to see that I could still be “intelligent” in the discussions, and ask smart and hard questions. This is a bit of a shift from industry debugging to high physics. You think you have lost the ability, but it’s still there.
Other people
I have met some other people, too. I won’t give all the names.
Enter Mike Iltis
Then I meet Mike Iltis while I was walking around taking pictures. He was having an intense discussion on State Street involving U-238 and I said “cool it dude, it sounds like you’re giving away secrets.” This is sarcastic in that it is public image that matters and not truth.
Some time has passed, and well, Mike sent me another one of his usual and typical e-mail’s, which I love getting, BTW. So, ummm, here are just some fancier papers on categorical quantum gravity, space time topology, and other fancy stuff. Well, that’s Mike. One of my goals is to learn and understand all of this material.
It’s not too hard to feel dumb pretty quickly. It’s good that the students think you’re smart. So much for feeling GR secure though.
