A book by Sean M. Carroll and how it’s rekindled my interest in physics
This book took longer than I expected to finish. It went quite quickly at first, going through the easier classical physics ideas and simple, intuitive quantum mechanics, but towards the last few chapters—especially during the discussion of quantum gravity, I slowed way down, struggling to understand it without having to reread several times.
Though I still haven’t fully understood everything after finishing the book, it has made me rediscover an interest in physics—specifically quantum mechanics and spacetime—something I never thought I’d ever be interested in again. I never used to be good at physics in school, failing every assignment and feeling bored out of my mind while the teacher droned on and on about Bohr’s models and other classical formulas that we just had to memorise (come to think of it, it might have been chemistry instead of physics. Nevertheless, atoms are atoms, regardless of whether they’re fundamentally fluctuations in quantum fields or even emergent phenomena where nothing we see is fundamental at all).
I hated memorising. I believed that if I understood the subject well enough, I wouldn’t need to memorise anything because I’d just remember and know whatever I needed to know, and for a brief period, that’s exactly what I tried to do: I started reading about physics on my own, learned about orbitals, the Aufbau principle, and even a little bit of astrophysics, which got me quite interested in the rest of quantum mechanics.
But, I was also 14 or 15 back then and extremely stubborn—though some might say too principled—and would absolutely refuse to put the “wrong” answer just to get marks. Let’s just say that nobody was impressed by me drawing an Aufbau diagram instead of using one of Bohr’s models like I was told to do or explaining things in terms of orbitals instead of shells. I knew that examiners couldn’t award marks for answers outside of the answer sheet, but I wouldn’t compromise even if it meant failing the exam. They wanted me to follow the textbook, but I never saw the textbook as anything more than a stepping stone, and as far as I was concerned, I had already finished reading the textbook.
Come to think of it, I would often be punished for reading ahead under the allegation of not paying attention during lessons: another word for the teacher taking one hour to explain something that only needs five minutes. This went on for some time. Teachers would call out my name, hold up the lesson just to either lecture me or make me flip back, and classmates would get increasingly annoyed that I was interrupting their lessons, mumbling nasty things under their breath. Eventually, I lost interest. I stopped reading, and… I gave up on learning altogether, even to the point my attendance rate plummeted. Funnily enough, that’s when they finally left me alone. After I started failing every exam nobody complained about me not paying attention or whether I was even in school at all. It was around this time I became depressed (which I’ve written briefly about in a previous post), though this was only one of the many factors leading up to it. The rest is a topic for another day.
Anyway, I never thought that I’d ever become interested in physics again till years later when I picked up The Big Picture, which eventually led to the book in today’s post. It made me read further about the many concepts brought up in the book, and I started tuning in to channels on YouTube such as PBS Spacetime, Sixty Symbols, and SciShow Space.
My lack of a strong mathematics foundation has led me to struggle with some of the more theoretical and abstract concepts such as the different models of quantum gravity or entropy as space (and time?), but the difference is now, I have a willingness to try anyway.
But, as much as I want to continue reading about physics, the next book on my shelf: Behave by Robert Sapolsky, has been growing impatient for over a year and it’s about time I finally get to it. For the time being, I’ll stick to only watching physics videos instead.