My first physics professor preached to the class that Physics is about basic physical principles.
It's not about formulas.
He used to break of a piece of chalk and whiz it over the head of any student that he thought was memorizing formulas to solve problems.
At the time I never really grasped the point that he was making.
To me, sitting down and struggling to derive and solve mechanics problems were more then enough to keep me too busy to wonder about the philosophy of science.
Now that I have a little more life experience under my belt, I've begun to understand more about what he was getting at, and how far away modern physics takes us from those ideals.
After mechanics, came waves and electrodynamics, then mechanics and electrodynamics again. This was followed by 2 years of quantum mechanics along with thermodynamics.
Each course brought with it a higher level of abstraction and more mathematics to get in the way of the basic physical principles, until we were confronted with quantum mechanics.
I've read quite a few books on the philosophy of quantum mechanics and many non-technical books on modern physics. I haven't found one that describes what I think is the fundamental difficulty with QM.
The only language we have to understand quantum mechanics is mathematics.
Even relativity still uses every day concepts like velocity, light, length and time, it just puts them together using an unfamiliar geometry.
Any common sense description of quantum mechanics begins with concepts like the wave-particle duality, or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
This is usually handled with descriptions of the double slit experiment with a few diagrams or photographs of some of the experimental results.
I've always found this unsatisfying.
Perhaps, it's because I was taught using the Montessori philosopy, where all the senses are used to teach.
Counting, the alphabet, arithmetic, reading, and many other subjects are presented through, touch, sound, visual media, and language to imbue a richer and deeper understanding
of the concepts.
I want to attempt to bring this type of experience to modern physics.
I believe the best way to do this is through computer simulations.
Graphics cards and computers are more then powerful enough to simulate and display illustrative examples of quantum, classical and relativistic physics.
My first goal is for an application about as powerful as a graphing calculator.
Then I plan to grow it until it enables working at a higher level, manipulating the physical objects themselves, and generating the underlying equations to solve
the problem in many different forms.
I plan to have a beta version for download by the end of the year.
In the meantime, I'll do some more posts fleshing out my plans for the application and more on my limited understanding of physics as I try to make sense of it all.