Epigraph(s) from my physics MS thesis

"The investigations of the self-energy of the electron by men like Abraham, Lorentz and Poincare have long since ceased to be relevant. All that has remained from those early times is that we still do not understand the problem."
--Abraham Pais, 'Subtle is the Lord...': The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (1982). The full names of the men mentioned by Pais are Max Abraham, Hendrik A. Lorentz, and Henri Poincare. See thesis for a discussion of their contributions.

"I do not believe that the problem of matter is to be solved by a mere field theory."

--Hermann Weyl, Gravitation and Electricity (1923). Weyl was a mathematical physicist who became an expert in general relativity.
Einstein wasn't very mathematically gifted himself, and had help developing the non-Euclidian geometry used to describe general relativity, mainly from his friend Marcel Grossmann: "Grossmann, you must help me or I will go crazy!" was Einstein's way of initially requesting assistance.

"...'matter' has lost its role as a fundamental concept."

--Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. This is a book Einstein wrote for the general public in the early 1920s. The comment here comes from a final short chapter added to the last edition of the book, published in 1952, three years before Einstein died.


"Physics is the study of the fundamental laws of nature, but what constitutes a law and which laws are taken to be fundamental are matters of evolving consensus among physicists."

--Richard A. Matzner and Lawrence C. Shepley, Classical Mechanics (1991). Matzner and Shepley are physicists at the University of Texas at Austin.

 

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These quotes are meant to touch upon a common theme. The theme is that I believe physics is off track in its reliance on virtual particles, quantum field theory and the attempt to quantize gravity.  I would like to see a return to a reliance on physical intuition as being important for understanding physics.  This is one reason I don't like Feynman diagrams.  They're a poor substitute for physical intuition, especially the simplest diagram, which is supposed to show emission of a photon by an electron.  The diagram is a ghastly schematic squiggly line plus two straight lines.

For a humorous mention of the physicist Hermann Weyl, see the 1929 interview with Dirac by the Wisconsin sports writer nicknamed "Roundy." (Somewhere else in this old blog I reference this interview, but it's worth a second link.) For a look at my thesis, see my "old writings" blog, or (maybe) Google books. 

In Dirac's book Principles of Quantum Mechanics, a copy of which can be seen on Larry Gopnik's desk when he discovers the money in the envelope, there's a famous statement about the superposition and interference of light. Normally, interference is something that occurs between two or more waves that overlap or superpose. But the representation of a photon as a coherent superposition (of left and right circular polarization states, for example) is described by Dirac in this book as a self-interference: "Each photon interferes only with itself. Interference between two different photons never occurs."

Radical!  But also maybe limited in it's applicability...