The engineer

The engineer was not primarily a physicist, or a business man, or an inventor but someone who would acquire some of the skills and knowledge of each of these and be capable of successfully developing and applying new devices on a grand scale.

Vannevar Bush

Einstein papers

Three were the papers that Einstein published on Relativity Theory («On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies»), Suspended Particles («On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat») and Photoelectric Effect («On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light»). In one last paper he added that in order to clarify that energy and mass HAD to be connected or everything he had said wouldn’t make sense, and he scribbled the E=MC2 famous equation («Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?»).

3 + 1 papers published in less than a year that changed physics history. After going through them all, I not going to pretend that I understood everything because I missed some points, but I am going to argue that every science student should compulsory read them. Engineers, Mathematicians, Physics and everyone brave enough to survive some formulas has so much to learn from them.

Einstein always starts expressing his irritability facing theories that didn’t match. He believed in a unique explanation for a same phenomenon, no matter the perspective: a theory of everything (as the name of the Steven Hopkins movie that I mentioned I couple of entries ago says).

Through Einstein’s papers you mostly see mentions to other great scientist of the time. At the first look it might seem that he is synthetizing them, but actually he goes further and beyond. He takes what works in the theories, finds the mistakes and fixes them. It doesn’t matter if in order to do that he has to bomb the most popular beliefs, or to go to the roots of space and time. Einstein used tones of critical analysis and philosophical thoughts, and just a few new equations. He was more into the simplifying mood, but the only equation he ‘invented’ changed the world.

Maths vs Physics

Some tricky demonstration that seems to be some freak non-sense, similar to the 1+1=3 buuuuut that astonishingly it is used in string theory!

The week point from my amateur opinion is precisely the 1-1+1-1+1-1… = 1/2. As far as I have been tought in my dear Engineering School that sum does not converge, therefore limit does not exist. Or as our super-smart MatLab would say: NaN (not a number).

I get that mathematically you can get super rigorous demonstrations on that, which Engineers and Physics may believe but not understand. So, once we have reach this point of taking sides, what makes me flip is that actually that final solution can be the answer to many problems in string theory. It’s a way to say that we are missing soooo much about the deep explanation of things.