- #1
ComplexVar89
Gold Member
- 21
- 9
Hello. I'm John.
As the title says, I'm both a student and autodidact. How does that work? As a formal student, my degree is entirely online and has lots of math (computational, not proofs-based) in it, but my true love is physics and, to a slightly lesser extent, other scientific disciplines. I can't exactly earn a physics degree online, though, so I have to study that independently. Oh, well.
My favorite areas of physics are relativity (both SR and GR--I cannot see why crackpots want to disprove them!) and cosmology.
I'm also a fiction writer, sometimes. I have a core set of narrow interests I tend to cycle through, to the exclusion of most everything else. No, I am not well-rounded in the least.
Fun fact 01: Reading a paper by Lee Smolin, entitled "The case for background independence" has been influential in helping me decide which areas of beyond-the-standard-model physics I might want to study, if I ever get that far. (It also gave competent voice to some of the gut-level doubts I had after reading certain of the many popular science books out there I've read over the years.)
Fun fact 02: I lurk sometimes and look up stuff mentioned that catches my interest--thus, how I found Smolin's paper.
Observation: As is talked about in Feynman's Tips On Physics, I view myself to be at the bottom third of the class here, but that's not so bad, when I'm in a group as good as this one. :-) At the very least, it means I have a major leg-up on the general population in understanding physics, which is good enough for me.
As the title says, I'm both a student and autodidact. How does that work? As a formal student, my degree is entirely online and has lots of math (computational, not proofs-based) in it, but my true love is physics and, to a slightly lesser extent, other scientific disciplines. I can't exactly earn a physics degree online, though, so I have to study that independently. Oh, well.
My favorite areas of physics are relativity (both SR and GR--I cannot see why crackpots want to disprove them!) and cosmology.
I'm also a fiction writer, sometimes. I have a core set of narrow interests I tend to cycle through, to the exclusion of most everything else. No, I am not well-rounded in the least.
Fun fact 01: Reading a paper by Lee Smolin, entitled "The case for background independence" has been influential in helping me decide which areas of beyond-the-standard-model physics I might want to study, if I ever get that far. (It also gave competent voice to some of the gut-level doubts I had after reading certain of the many popular science books out there I've read over the years.)
Fun fact 02: I lurk sometimes and look up stuff mentioned that catches my interest--thus, how I found Smolin's paper.
Observation: As is talked about in Feynman's Tips On Physics, I view myself to be at the bottom third of the class here, but that's not so bad, when I'm in a group as good as this one. :-) At the very least, it means I have a major leg-up on the general population in understanding physics, which is good enough for me.
