Physicists' education curriculum
I want to know how God created the world, but I'm not interested in one particular phenomenon or another. I want to know the internal laws of the world, and the rest are details. -Einstein
Two interesting stories from my childhood greatly enriched my understanding of the world and made me a theoretical physicist.
I remember my parents took me to San Francisco from time to time to visit the famous Japanese tea garden. I squatted by a small pool there, intoxicated by the colorful carp swimming slowly among the water lilies. This is one of the happiest memories of my childhood.
At that quiet moment, I was full of infinite reverie. I often ask myself questions that only children can ask, such as how carp in the pond observe the world around them. I think their world must be wonderful!
Carp have lived in this shallow pool all their lives. They believe that their "universe" is made up of dark pool water and water lilies. They spend most of their time wandering at the bottom of the pool, so they only vaguely realize that there is another outside world above the water. The essence of my world is beyond their understanding. I like to sit only a few tens centimeters away from carp, but we are as far apart as an abyss. Carp and I live in two completely different universes and never enter each other's world. We are separated by a thin fence on the water.
I once thought that there might be some carp "scientists" among the fish at the bottom of the water. I think this carp "scientist" will be cynical about those fish that suggest that there is another parallel world besides water lilies. They think that the only thing that really exists is what fish can see and touch. The pool is everything. The invisible world outside the pool has no scientific significance.
Once, I was caught in a rainstorm. I noticed thousands of small raindrops bombarding the surface of the pool water. The water in the pool became chaotic, and the water lilies in the water swayed under the turbulent waves. While avoiding the wind and rain, I want to find out what form everything around me will appear in the eyes of carp. In their eyes, the water lily seems to be moving by itself and nothing can be washed away. Because just as we can't see the air and space around us, carp can't see the water on which they live, and they are puzzled that water lilies can exercise themselves.
I think carp "scientists" will skillfully invent something fictional-it is called "force" to cover up their ignorance. Because they can't understand the invisible water waves, they will come to the conclusion that the water lily can move without being touched because there is an invisible mysterious force acting on it. They may give this illusion an inscrutable name (such as the action from a distance or the ability to move without touching water lilies).
I once thought, what would happen if a carp "scientist" was caught in the pool? Before putting it back in the pool, it may struggle frantically to be examined by me. So what will other carp think of this? For them, this is really a terrible thing. They realized for the first time that a carp "scientist" had disappeared from their universe. It's as simple as that, leaving no trace. No matter how they searched in their universe, there was no trace of the lost carp. However, just a few seconds later, when I put it back in the pool, the carp "scientist" suddenly appeared. For other carp, this is really a miracle.
After the calm, carp "scientists" will tell a legendary story that really surprises them. It said: "Suddenly, somehow, I was pulled out of our universe (pool water) and thrown into an invisible world where there were dazzling lights and strange objects I had never seen before. The strangest thing is that the creature that caught me is nothing like a fish. What shocked me even more was that it couldn't see its fins anyway, but it could still move without fins. The familiar laws of nature are no longer suitable for this invisible world. Then, I found myself suddenly thrown back into our world. " (Of course, this story of traveling outside the universe is bizarre to carp, and most fish think it is completely nonsense. )
I often think that we are like carp swimming proudly in the pool. We spend all our lives in our own "pool", thinking that our universe only contains those things that can be seen and touched. Like carp, we think that the universe only contains familiar and visible things. We smugly refuse to admit that there are other parallel universes or multidimensional spaces right in front of our universe, which is beyond our understanding. If our scientists invent the concept of force, it is only because they can't see the invisible vibration that fills the space around us. Some scientists despise the idea of a higher dimensional world because they can't verify it conveniently in the laboratory. Our universe may be one of countless parallel universes. Each universe is connected with other universes through countless holes-tunnels connecting two airspace. It is possible to travel between these cavities, but the possibility is very small. )
Since then, I have become extremely interested in the possibility of a high-dimensional world. Like many children, I greedily read such an adventure story, which tells the story of time travelers entering other multidimensional spaces and exploring parallel universes that we can't see, where it is easy to make the usual laws of physics no longer work. When I grow up, I wonder if the ship that mysteriously disappeared in the Bermuda Delta only entered a space loophole. Asimov's "Base" series amazed me. The discovery of hyperspace travel in the book led to the rise of a galactic empire.
The second thing in my childhood also left a deep impression on me. I heard a story when I was eight years old, and it has remained in my mind ever since. I remember my middle school teacher told the class a story about a great late scientist. They talked about him with great reverence and called him the greatest scientist in the whole human history. They said that few people could understand his ideas, but his discovery changed the whole world and everything around us. I don't understand many things they want to tell us, but what interests me most is that he died before he finished his great discovery. They said that he had been working on this theory for many years, but after his death, his unfinished paper was still on his own desk.
I was fascinated by this story. For a child, this is very mysterious. What is his unfinished work? What is the content of the paper on his desk? What problem may be so difficult to solve, so important that it is worth such a great scientist to spend his life on this kind of research? Out of curiosity, I decided to learn as much as possible about Einstein and his unfinished theory. I remember spending a lot of time quietly reading every book I could find about this great man and his theory. This memory is still warm as spring. After reading the books in the local library, I began to search all the libraries and bookstores in the city, eagerly looking for relevant clues. I soon learned that this story is more exciting than any mysterious murder story and more important than anything I imagined. I decided to get to the bottom of this secret, even if I had to become a theoretical physicist for it.
Soon, I knew that Einstein's unfinished paper was the so-called unified field theory he tried to construct. This theory can explain all natural laws from tiny atoms to vast galaxies. However, as a child, I can't understand that there may be some connection between the carp swimming in the tea garden pool and the unfinished paper on Einstein's desk. I don't understand that using higher dimensions may be the key to solving the unified field theory.
Later, in high school, I read a lot of books in the local library and often went to the physics library of Stanford University. There, I found that Einstein's work made it possible for a new substance called antimatter. This substance acts in the same way as ordinary matter, but when it comes into contact with ordinary matter, it will annihilate and suddenly release energy. I also know that scientists have built some large-scale instruments, or "atomic colliders", which can produce a small amount of this strange substance in the laboratory, that is, antimatter.
One advantage of young people is that they will not be intimidated by secular constraints, which is usually difficult for most adults to surpass. Without considering the difficulties, I started to build my own atomic collider. I've been studying the scientific literature, and finally I'm sure I can build a so-called electron induction accelerator, which can accelerate electrons to million electron volts (1 million electron volts refers to the energy obtained after electrons are accelerated in an electric field of 1 million volts).
First, I bought a small amount of sodium 22, which is a radioactive substance and can naturally emit positrons (antimatter of electrons). Then I built a cloud room, in which I could see the traces left by subatomic particles. So I can take hundreds of beautiful photos left by antimatter in the cloud room. Then, I searched a large number of electronic warehouses around, assembled the necessary hardware equipment, including hundreds of pounds (1 pound =454 grams) of waste treatment steel, and built an electron induction accelerator with 2.3 million electron volts in my workshop, which is fully capable of generating a beam of anti-electrons. In order to generate the huge magnetic field necessary for the electron induction accelerator, I persuaded my parents to help me wind 22 miles (1 mile = 1.6 1 km) of copper wire on the football field of my high school. We spent a whole Christmas holiday on this 50-yard (1 yard =0.9 1 meter) long line, winding and installing bulky coils, which will bend the motion path of high-energy electrons.
When it was finally built, this 300-pound, 6-kilowatt electron induction accelerator consumed every bit of energy generated by my family. I usually blow every fuse when I answer it, and the room becomes dark. Mother often shakes her head periodically when the house is in the dark. I think my mother is puzzled that he can't have a son who plays in a baseball field or basketball court, but he has a son who builds a huge electronic instrument in the garage. To my delight, the instrument successfully produced a magnetic field more than 20,000 times stronger than the geomagnetic field, which is necessary to accelerate the electron beam.
Overall perception
The biggest feature of this article is the rich flavor of life: "I" crouched by the pond, intoxicated by the slowly swimming carp, and thus produced infinite reverie; When I was eight years old, I listened to the story of Einstein, a theoretical physicist. With a curious childlike innocence, I read every book about Einstein and others' theories and finally decided to be a theoretical physicist. In high school, I built my own atomic collider and immersed myself in scientific experiments. The three main contents of the article 100% describe the author's interesting ideas about childhood and high school life.
The "education" in the title of the article is the author's self-education in a strict sense. Because the content is full of life breath, some profound theoretical and physical problems involved in this paper have become meaningful. Furthermore, an article describing "curriculum" uncharacteristically chooses three most representative things to describe, so as to express the main idea of the article and reveal the elements of "educational curriculum".