Dick’s Tricks - Leonard Susskind - 5/11/2018

At that time, of course, he was a famous physicist, so I don't think anyone doubted him, but on the other hand it must have been something of a shock to people who had been doing other mathematical methods so elaborate that someone could see through them. of them so clearly again. but deep

tricks

the last example I'm going to talk about is from around 1968 I was already 28 years old at that time I was a young assistant physics professor and in fact the things I was thinking about at that time were very, very related to the things I was thinking about, so I know them firsthand.

It has to do with the proton. The proton is a particle, of course, and it is a particle. of a class called hadrons, Hadrian's are not simple elementary particles, they are made of many other small particles smaller than themselves that today we call those particles quarks and gluons in 1968 people already knew about quarks, perhaps It's not so much about gluons but Fineman didn't want to commit to the material that the proton was made of, so he just called it by a name that he made up, he called it part in time, part in time, part like the part of a proton , no one knew too much about these. parts but experiments were being carried out experiments were being carried out at the Stanford Linear Accelerator to bombard the proton with electrons, hit it with electrons and see what comes out or see how the electron behaves after bombarding Bob is the proton and you will learn something about the structure of the proton there was an army of people calculating how protons and electrons should collide with each other and what they were using what was the technique they were using raise your hand if you think you know oh I'll tell you Fineman diagrams When finding diagrams, The problem was that the proton is made up of all these particles that, like liquid helium, bounced around and collided with each other intensely in such a way that as the electron passed through the proton, so many collisions happened. of the protons themselves that Fineman's diagrams became incredibly complicated.

It was a nightmare trying to calculate Fineman's diagrams. Well, the trick was necessary. The trick I both found them happy to say. It also occurred to me to use the special theory of relativity. In the theory of relativity you can examine a thing from any reference frame and if you go to the reference frame where the proton is moving very fast, the proton moves to the right with an extremely large speed, the protons also move to the right. right. Lorentz and Einstein told us that something happens to the image of the proton, it gets squashed, squashed, and collapsed into a flat pancake.

It's called Lorentz contraction. Now that in itself wasn't very helpful, but there's something else going on. It's called time dilation. The internal movements. The relative movements of everyone. The Parton structure and the substructure slow down, which meant that in that frame the proton was an object that didn't have much to do and if you study the proton in that frame and you collide it with an electron, you can think. of each of the frozen Partons, you hit them one at a time and what happens when the electron that is the Purple Line hits the proton and hits the proton is that it hits a part and destroys it, that was the whole theory, there was no further.

That was the whole theory that Fineman used to analyze the experiments that were going on at SLAC and it was extremely effective, extremely effective and again he found the trick that he might have embarrassed some people but also excited a lot of people. and it made things easier there was another person who was also involved in this I should say I should just tell you who it was he was a physicist a good friend of both of us called Jane Pure Cane James your cane was also another physicist who knew how NAND knows how to think simply and I had a very similar image.

Those are the examples I wanted to show you about how Fineman thought and the performer, the magician and the physicist, like they all noticed something very special now, right? fun and games, it was all

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, it was all, no, of course, there was deep knowledge that fire had, it was all ego, no. Fineman had a profound lesson that he was trying to teach people, he was a teacher, among other things, he wanted to teach the lesson. that jargon, verbiage, mathematics that is too valuable, mathematics that is too abstract generally does not help you think about the phenomena, the way you think about the phenomena, well, maybe you don't close your eyes, but you think about the phenomena themselves and then you convert them.

For math, you use the simplest tools you can, whatever the simplest tools are, if you use them, you will learn more about physics. This was Fineman's legacy, I think, and it is a legacy that I hope is not lost, all young physicists. You know about Fineman, but do you know what he really stood for: simplicity, honesty, and a way of thinking that focused on the phenomena themselves rather than fancy mathematics, by the way, one last thing that someone has already mentioned is that Fineman was , in fact, very philosophical even though he claimed to hate philosophy and was in fact the most philosophical physicist I have ever met.

He also claimed that he did not like mathematics. He was the most mathematical physicist he knew, but he knew how to use them and you have to use the simplest parts to understand them. obtain the most transcendental conclusions thanks