Academia

[No. 6]

The flaw in academia is that it tries to teach you what to think , when it should be teaching how to think .

Originally Posted by No. 6

The flaw in academia is that it tries to teach you what to think , when it should be teaching how to think .

My latest bit of academia was from a Mistress she certainly taught me what to think

[No. 6]

That's brilliant Reefy , a timely injection of humour .

[cowerme]

Originally Posted by No. 6

The flaw in academia is that it tries to teach you what to think , when it should be teaching how to think .

If you haven't learned the tools of critical thinking, researching and presenting empirical evidence you won't function in academia. Select facts to bolster the answer in your back pocket and you'll get found out.

[ex nihilo]

Originally Posted by No. 6

The flaw in academia is that it tries to teach you what to think , when it should be teaching how to think .

Certainly true for the younger Einstein. A lot of people are put off by the mathematics, the blackboards and all those equations written in chalk. Strange that all our modern kit, MacBooks, Pads etc is not sexy enough for theoretical physics. Folk crowded around the old blackboard, with chalk and chalk dusters in hand, is still the order of the day. The complexity can put people off and one of the reasons for Einstein’s success was his rebellious, un-muzzled and different approach. He was not what you would call academic when he was younger. Got into Uni at his second attempt and was not offered a research post on graduation. Instead he joined the Swiss Patent Office as a clerk and being out of academia and its conventional approach a new door cracked open for him. A lot of the pending inventions were very visual, lots of diagrams showing how the novelty worked. It sort of fired up in him the idea of thought experiments rather than following academic strait jackets. At that time there was basically two huge branches of physics in play. Isaac Newton’s classical mechanics and James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetism. The patent office was in Switzerland which was world leader in time technology and a lot of time technology was focused on railway timetables and synchronisation across the network. Einstein was also fascinated by Maxwell’s conclusion that the speed of light was a fixed constant independent of an inertial frame of reference.

So he built a train set. A man stood on the platform with a beam of light shone past him. A train passes the station with a woman on it. As the train approaches the speed of light the beam might be expected to pass by the woman more slowly than seen by the man on the platform. Consistent with Newton but not Maxwell’s constant. Einstein turned the whole thing on its head by saying that the flow of time may not be the same for all observers. Einstein asked can events happen simultaneously? He imagined the man having two bolts of lightening hitting the platform at equal distances either side of him at the same time. That would be simultaneous. Then he put himself in the shoes of the woman on the train moving at close to the speed of light. As the train would be moving towards one strike and away from the other strike, time would elapse between the strikes. Therefore different observers cannot agree simultaneity which suggests that they cannot agree on the flow of time itself, concluding in the fact that there can be no absolute or universal time. So, this lack of simultaneity and the fact that to the man on the platform and the woman on the train the speed of light remains the same will lead to the conclusion that relative to the man on the platform, for the woman on the train time actually runs slower. Do the heavy duty mathematics and E=mc squared comes about.