Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "Special Relativity | Lecture 1" video.

  1. This is the sound, younger, Leonard Susskind, before he settled down for long evenings of "Werner Erhardt" bullshit in San Francisco and decided that all the problems of physics could be solved if you just replace any inconvenient zeroes with little itsy-bitsies you call strings. Why do you call them strings? Why not lumps? Or nice straight rods maybe? Your problem with lumps or rods is that people might start asking questions. How big? How do you know? Where did you see them? Do they go bump in the night? All of a sudden you'd be subject to the conventions of empirical science. Strings don't have these problems because we've been studying them for thousands of years, so we know all about them. They're harmonic, and they just behave mathematically. At first people thought they could get away with them all being sinusoidal, and that's still the starting point for every creative meander. Still, there's nots of new mathematicses in the past four hundred years, so there are other things to try out, too. All you have to do is "Just do the math, fellas," and that's what every soi disant physicist has been doing ever since. The volume of maths produced in this effort is impressive -- if you're impressed by page counts. The amount of physical reality, though, seems, uh, is "invisible" the word I'm looking for? But yeah, Leonard Susskind on Einstein up to 1905 is reasonably OK.
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