Giovanni

Some take stimulants to keep going, I read biographies of TR, Churchill, Hamilton, and the like. I might have found them obnoxious in real life, but boy they sure spur me into activity! Who else can I add to this list of stimulants?

I also liked Taft, who now seems underappreciated. Their tumultuous friendship reminded me of that between Adams and Jefferson. What are other examples of rollercoaster friendships between public figures?

For the first third of this book I remember thinking ‘if I wanted to read meandering prose, I would have re-read Proust', and for the last third: ‘... and now? this seems anticlimactic', but that middle third is harrowing and haunting. This chilling description of the walk to the meeting point will stay with me:

The closer we came to it, the more often did small groups of people carrying and dragging their heavy burdens emerge from the darkness, moving laboriously towards the same place through the snow, which was falling more thickly now, so that gradually a caravan strung out over a long distance formed, and it was with this caravan that we reached the Trade Fair entrance, faintly illuminated by a single electric lightbulb, towards seven in the morning.
Ultimately you realize how it all fits together. Masterful.

Interesting read, but I find it peculiar that Richard Feynman had such a refreshing and honest take on scientific publishing and reporting (i.e. that it should be honest and not a carefully manufactured story in which all the mistakes and false leads are omitted), and then allowed for himself a carefully crafted, self-indulgent (hagiographical I dare say) memoir, with all the big and small successes, but no mistakes, doubts, or regrets.

paraphrasing Einstein, I declare that time must slow down under the pull of complex physics.

paraphrasing Heisenberg, i hereby declare that you cannot explain complex concepts concisely and clearly at the same time.

Maybe if you know these topics reasonably well you can enjoy a cursory review in a 6-hour stroll (which is what happened to me for the concepts I was already familiar with), but if you want to understand them for the first (or second) time, a ‘brief history' won't do. You end up reading paragraphs like this, shrugging, and moving on:

Four years later, a possible solution, called “supergravity,” was suggested. The idea was to combine the spin-2 particle called the graviton, which carries the gravitational force, with certain other particles of spin 3/2, 1, ½, and 0. In a sense, all these particles could then be regarded as different aspects of the same “superparticle,” thus unifying the matter particles with spin ½ and 3/2 with the force-carrying particles of spin 0, 1, and 2. The virtual particle/antiparticle pairs of spin ½ and 3/2 would have negative energy, and so would tend to cancel out the positive energy of the spin 2, 1, and 0 virtual pairs. This would cause many of the possible infinities to cancel out, but it was suspected that some infinities might still remain.

“Well, what should I read?” you say. I recommend Carroll, Susskind, Great Courses, biographies of Einstein, Dirac, von Neumann, Feynman. “But it takes time!” you object. Well, QED

Fragmented by nature, sometimes heavy with little solace. Now when I feel down I can say with Pessoa: “Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me; everything jades me, whether or not it ever existed. I don't want to have my soul and don't want to renounce it. I want what I don't want and renounce what I don't have. I can't be nothing nor be everything: I'm the bridge between what I don't have and what I don't want.”