I wish I had read Dirac, Feynman et al at school. Schools let people down when it comes to the fundamental nature of reality. That's a pretty big gap.
Not sure it makes all that much sense - Dirac's booklet if you haven't acquired the maths isn't elegant awesomeness, it's dry gibberish :)
- Iphigenie
@iphigenie care to expand? ;)
- A. T.
are you sure? I have a masters in theoretical physics. Have forgotten much but still, could go on for a bit
- Iphigenie
all right, kidding aside. The beauty of dirac's thinking is partly the formalism. Now the way he represented it originally wasn't the final one we use today but it's still all there. But it is more beautiful after you've got the maths and have struggled with some of the other way - then it is one of these refreshing moments where you realise you can make abstraction of a lot of the mechanics of the math and get to the underlying structure by a clever choice of representation. Feels like genius - especially when you see where it allowed him to go, once all the chaff was out of the way. BUT if you tried to read this at school, before you've walked some of the path, then you'd hate it. It'd be obscure and cryptic and something you learn by heart and don't get. I know. I hated physics at school...
- Iphigenie