I pretty much took the day off work yesterday, due to a lingering cold that seems to have caught me on the flight back from Singapore (thanks, woman directly behind me who had to most awful sounding cough intermittently - I suspect you as the source), then got into a social media semi-argument with someone who had read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe book a decade or more ago and didn't really know about the "string wars" in physics in the 2000's and was reluctant to accept that Greene still promotes a too optimistic view of string theory's prospects.
Anyway, this led to me watching a lot of YouTube physics content, and reminded me that I had never watched enough of the channel Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal. It's really, really good.
Some of the content on The Institute of Art and Ideas YouTube page is very good on physics, too. (It reminded me that Roger Penrose thinks string theory is both "ugly" - contrary to claims by Greene that it's beautiful- and a complete waste of time.)
To suggest just one video I liked watching yesterday from those channels - I thought that Jacob Barande's summary of how quantum physics developed was well worth listening to:
I don't yet understand his take on the "reality" of the wavefunction, etc, for which I have to watch his full interview which goes for 2 1/4 hours! I do think, though, that this issue of the way to understand the fundamentals is a really important topic.
1 comment:
Thanks for the link Steve. In my retirement I've been coming at modern physics from the mathematical side, my PhD was in algebraic topology back in the mid 1980s and I have been pleasantly surprised at how relevant much of that general area has turned out to be. But the philosophy side is definitely worth a look, I might even chase up the full 2+ hours!
Lawrence
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