Crt 151201 Lastedit 20-12-27

Despair and Perseverance
Relativity theory Part 2: buried under mathematics ( Part 1)

Dear Friends,
Why my silence? I got boring. The entire winter now I am studying mathematics I need to understand relativity theory. Amid the general havoc of this disastrous project their is a small ray of light coming from ... Warffum, North Groningen, Netherlands. Herman Hofstede, a talented, industrious and ardent teacher there, made a great math site for high school kids that should be doable even for the cows surrounding that village. Over a thousand of web pages of math, reaching well beyond high school level.  

... Warffum. I can look for hours at this for I am myself from Groningen ...

My hero Herman Hofstede shows how far he stands above his subject, writing the student's play, featuring himself, unmistakably on stage as a life-size blowhard wearing a cap holding his bills.

... Herman Hofstede, author of  hhofstede.nl perhaps the best site for highschoolmath in the world but in ... Dutch (secretly I wish it was in my Groningen dialect) ... in action!  I do see a bodymike there, that I assume the sound-children have disabled to avoid the squeaks of acoustic feedback ... picture from the lovely school site of Hoogeland school, O, wish I was 11 again and went there...

Meanwhile I acquired nightmares in which I click  hhofstede.nl and get "Page Not Found". I race to Warffum. I get told he came under a cow. For security reasons I set my laptop at downloading the whole thing but the site's provider server got air of it and blocked it. Well. life is full of fear and uncertainty. If a total disaster comes over the earth my eyes will be on Warffum.

... and then they said: when that root is negative, it does not exist. And now they tell me they were not serious, like when they told me about gnomes, Santa, and worse ... well, fortunately  I never trusted them anyway ...

But Herman Hofstede provides only the launching platform. From the students of beta University Utrecht I bought heaps of course material, some as expensive as 5 euro and 31 cents. One student room up there is a serious shop even featuring a pin machine. I am not used to paying for my studies: Plato, Montaigne, Rabelais, Proust, Joyce, Musil, (my recent summary rewrites of them) are all free on internet. Actually, lot of good physics books are free on internet too.

The first whom I took on - and he me, though we never met [though he now saw this blog] - was Math Department's Dr. Wepster and his matrix course. I fail to understand how Utrecht students finish in a 6 week's 4 course bloc in which this only is one of them. This thing alone took me 7 weeks. But then, I do occasionally stare over my river for a day to end up thinking: "yes, he's right after all". Not sure that's allowed to curriculum students.

Maybe I should blog this episode one time. I would continue like this: right opposite the students course material shop is the physics student coffee room.
"Anyone of you student GRT?" I ask.
"GRT what's that"
""General Relativity Theory"
"O no, ask their teachers".
"Don't they drink coffee?"

But mailing teachers does not work. Where are the times a strange scholar, fled from Moravia for the murderous "Catholic-rebirth" was not, as nowadays, directed to an asylum seeker's detention centre and stuffed with teaching of the morally correct attitude to global warming, homosexuality, human rights and the Dutch Language and its National Anthem, the times when instead he descended from his horse in front of a Dutch University to be cordially welcomed, in Latin, by a delegation of the most eminent of its local professors?

That is about 400 year ago. He would introduce himself ("Comenius") tell them who he was and give his first lecture, slight off due to the lavish reception, the next day.

Well to be honest, things did not go that way and this painting has a totally different subject, I for long developed a life style of total independency on all axes and would not want it to be different. As a university student I already hated following those boring courses, and rarely did so, which only by miracle did not ruin by career options. Einstein, for the same reason, had bigger problems at start. From what I know about him he would have received me, like he would with everyone. But dead already, like Gaus, Lorentz, Minkovski, their works all freely available on internet, that is the other side of our times that amply makes good for it drawbacks: if you don't know how it came, you can profit all the same! What do you have to pay for nowadays? Sport channels, the bulshit of prize winners, the political propaganda of paywall newsmedia. Everything intellectually valuable is free! An my riverside's wireless broadband costs a trifle. Perch, geese and internet!

... the colour tape on the compass arms serve to keep track of where the arms go when you rotate the compass in the air to mimic  the axes of a rotating plane, an important exercise amply sufficient to give you headaches, especially when you add a pencil as a third axis, and then realize you would like add a fourth pencil perpendicular to those three and rotate that thing ...

... in a three-dimensional space you can reverse an R in 8 ways, in four that would be 16, isn't it better to stop this? On the other hand: once you have 4-D, if you loose two left gloves you could turn one of the remaining two right gloves in a left one by removing it from its 3-D space, turning it and putting it back in, as I read from Ludwig Wittgenstein, a man like Einstein, you had a lot of them at the time, for a brilliant book about many of these people - free of course - browse for  "Toulmin Janik, Wittgenstein's Vienna pdf"...

... After studying vectors and matrices you can apply to in a sawing workshop...

Some people that used to tell me about relativity start to run away from me. Among whom a retired physics professor. A retired math professor, in matrices all his life, could not go with me in regarding -2 as a root of 2^-1. I checked on Google, there is a considerable following there. With them I would surely never get where I want, but I agreed admiringly for he serve truly excellent wines. Then another one whom I suspect can do Lorentz transformation and worse, did not see why I foundered so hopelessly on that Einstein passage.

I am all alone. But that's OK. Throw all books away and reconstruct relativity from scratch on my own? After all, it's done before. But Einstein read math as I do a newspaper. And this Gauss! Unbelievable! While others still followed their orders and killed each other on horseback by the thousands.

You need to be tough anyway: among advanced physicists it is the habit to write formula's, limiting the remarks between them to expressions like "... in which ...", "... however ...", "... keep in mind ...", etc. and already the next formulas are wistling around your ears.

Some things you can't Google, like a delta (Δ) upside down. They use it for anything, but in my case it was simply a tangential plane ... Often you are supposed to understand what the variables mean. Beta education in Russia is the worst they say. Even Russian speaking Western physicists express surprise. The explanation coined is that the Russians want to select firm and fast right away.

But brains of my slowness are understood by no one in these circles. Too smart too understand, that is not a paradox. Nerds often are no good teachers, nor good leaders for that very reason.

But if you are ready to try much, you will find your way. Many times I often got things together by joining part of one explanation to part of another.

I am still miserably far away. I can do 4-dimensional rotations (though turning the glove has not succeeded yet). But now I have to do it with imaginary hyperbolic sine and cosine. Distances now are over four axes, and soon we stop making Cartesian grids with straight line axes to plot object but construe spaces by starting somewhere and creating a space by joining objects according to some law, as a result of which there can be many different shortest lines connecting two points.

Despair and perseverance. We don't give up!