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diff --git a/jones-la/reflection.tex b/jones-la/reflection.tex index a9b9299..83bf663 100644 --- a/jones-la/reflection.tex +++ b/jones-la/reflection.tex @@ -1,34 +1,52 @@ \input mla8 +\def\sec#1{\vskip.1\hsize\goodbreak\vskip-.1\hsize\noindent{\bf #1}\par\nobreak} \numberfirstpage \name{Holden} \last{Rohrer} \prof{Jones} \clas{AP Lang} -%\header +\header \medskip -\noindent{\bf Part 1: Book Overview} +\sec{Part 1: Book Overview} -I read Stephen Hawking's ``A Brief History of Time,'' which used a much less narrative structure than a traditional memoir does. -It describes modern physics historically---how different theories developed over time, and I think that's why it's so effective. -Personal anecdotes like Hawking's co-development of the ``no-boundary proposal,'' where the universe is treated as flat (changing the definition of time so that it becomes indistinguishable with the spatial dimensions) or Newton's bitter feuds with other scientists are much more comprehensible than a purely mathematical construction of modern models. +I read Stephen Hawking's ``A Brief History of Time,'' which maintained a narrative structure despite being a physics book. +Instead of using complex mathematical concepts, it describes modern physics historically---how different theories developed over time and who pioneered them. +Anecdotes like Hawking's co-development of the ``no-boundary proposal,'' where the universe is treated as flat (changing the definition of time so that it becomes indistinguishable with the spatial dimensions) or Newton's bitter feuds with other scientists develop his explanatory power, which is already formidable. +Additionally, it takes a philosophical rather than purely descriptive approach to science---what it should be, what it is, and the implications that physics have on considerations like determinism. -It centers around the two major modern theories of physics, quantum mechanics (the theory that describes very small things) and general relativity (the theory that describes very heavy things). -Each chapter is organized chronologically and centers on a certain realization or broad change in consensus, so they mostly start with a discussion of ``classical'' physics, theories that made intuitive sense on a human scale like the laws of motion or the geocentric (universe centered on Earth) model. +One of the most interesting components of his book are his bets with Kip Thorne. +The first of these is cosmic censorship or if a singularity (the infinitely dense point at the center of a black hole) could exist without a black hole. +Hawking lost but ``still claims a moral victory'' because a highly unstable naked singularity was found to be possible. +He also bet that a star at which all the evidenced pointed to it orbiting about a black hole wasn't orbiting around a black hole as a ``form of insurance'' against Hawking's work on black holes. +He lost this too, but the personality emblematic in the bets expands the idea that the book is about scientists more than science---and even has an autobiographical focus. +Hawking's biographical and philosophical writing emphasizes one more virtue, graceful incorrectness. +From Einstein freely admitting both the cosmological constant and denial of quantum mechanics as errors and Hawking's own accountability to Eddington's dogmatism, Hawking's stance that scientists should embrace corrections is thematic throughout the book. -As such, each is effectively a story. +While the book is well-written and thoroughly instructive, it will become out of date just as the original copy of the book became out of date (Hawking appended some short essays on modern physics and the developments he was excited for like the continued operation of gravitational wave laboratories). +Therefore, I don't expect it to be timeless and last even 40 years, let alone 100 even though I'd recommend it to a contemporary audience. -\noindent{\bf Part 2: My Passion} +\sec{Part 2: My Passion} My passion is problem-solving. At the beginning of this project, I thought that it was some specific field or study like computer science or mathematics or engineering, but my favorite bits of those fields are centred around solving problems. -In computer science or software engineering, there's a subcategory of embedded systems---small, highly constrained computers like the one that runs a thermostat or records data from a microphone into a wire. -I've set up and used a few of these for different tasks. -One such use case is running a small speaker or, as I attempted to do in a project for the engineering class, running headphones from an aux cable and providing a button-based interface to a small song library stored on an SD card. -My group was unsuccessful for a number of reasons, but we managed -\noindent{\bf Part 3: Connection} -The story which stood out to me the most was Hawking's development of Hawking Radiation, where black holes release energy like a star, albeit at much lower temperatures. +With respect to computer science, I have often made my life harder because I wanted to be able to solve a puzzle of some sort. +Embedded systems---small, highly constrained computers in devices like thermostats or microphones---are a great example of this, because they can be fully documented in a couple hundred pages, but it's difficult to achieve much more than blinking an LED on or off. +I wrote assembly code for one in an attempt to play music on an aux cable. +It worked to a degree, and it would have been much easier and simpler to use existing libraries, but I wasn't doing it to get the end result as quickly as possible; instead, I wanted to see if I could. +I do a number of things like using Linux or \TeX\ for this same reason (they're harder and more rewarding than the alternatives), and while I vaguely understood my motives, this project helped me verbalize and qualify that I am passionate about problem solving. + +\sec{Part 3: Connection} + +The story that stands out the most to me, especially in comparison with my passion, is the development of Hawking radiation. +Hawking discovered a proof for the deceptively straightforward idea that black holes can't lose area (at least in the classical sense). +The method by which he did this isn't very important, but his response is relevant. He was ``so excited \dots that [he] did not get much sleep that night.'' +The next day, he called Roger Penrose, who confirmed the idea, but it contradicted the second law of thermodynamics. +If the area of the event horizon could not decrease, the entropy inside the black hole would be stuck there forever. +Hawking discovered a mathematical model to explain this. +Virtual particles (a result of quantum mechanics that antiparticle-particle pairs appear spontaneously everywhere) could decrease the mass of a black hole very slowly, in exact proportion to the amount of energy loss black holes should have if they were normal objects. +I'm not working on anything nearly as notable, but I am passionate about the kind of analysis he did because it's a tool for problem-solving; math is one way of finding out what's true. \bye |