A Bible and Too Many Emphases
A couple of weeks ago I totally scored at the excellent second-hand book stall at our on-campus Market Day. Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (hardcover, excellent condition, marked at only $18 but the cool stallholder - who looks like a white-haired and happy Robinson Crusoe - appreciates a repeat customer and gave it to me for $15!).
Is huge and daunting and delicious. WAY too much math. Am just over a tenth of the way in (p. 115) and so far the math has been mostly just reminders of school and undergrad. It starts out with proofs and Pythagoras and geometry, but it already hit complex numbers (Chapter 4) and the next chapter (7) is Complex-number Calculus which I don't recall doing! Already though there've been a couple of endorphin spiking insights and connections made that've made me go "oh! of course!".
But overall it's huge and scary and I suspect one should really be sitting down and concentrating (and trying the suggested proofs and exercises in the footnotes! :-P ) and reading it all the way through in one continuous(ish) effort to get the most out of it (so one can remember previous math and arguments and things), whereas I've mainly been reading it on the train rather sporadically[1] and not even considering trying any of the bloody suggested derivations[2] and such! Suspect I'll get stuck at some bit (rather soon) and then it'll sit on the bedside table for months and by the time I force self to go back to it I won't be able to follow what's going on[3]...
[1] I left it for 2 weeks while I read fiction and felt all anxious when I came back to it.
[2] Ooh! Solutions!
[3] This morning I skimmed a single paragraph and suddenly realized things weren't making sense and had to go back and reread the paragraph properly and actually think about it before I could go on :-(
Is huge and daunting and delicious. WAY too much math. Am just over a tenth of the way in (p. 115) and so far the math has been mostly just reminders of school and undergrad. It starts out with proofs and Pythagoras and geometry, but it already hit complex numbers (Chapter 4) and the next chapter (7) is Complex-number Calculus which I don't recall doing! Already though there've been a couple of endorphin spiking insights and connections made that've made me go "oh! of course!".
But overall it's huge and scary and I suspect one should really be sitting down and concentrating (and trying the suggested proofs and exercises in the footnotes! :-P ) and reading it all the way through in one continuous(ish) effort to get the most out of it (so one can remember previous math and arguments and things), whereas I've mainly been reading it on the train rather sporadically[1] and not even considering trying any of the bloody suggested derivations[2] and such! Suspect I'll get stuck at some bit (rather soon) and then it'll sit on the bedside table for months and by the time I force self to go back to it I won't be able to follow what's going on[3]...
[1] I left it for 2 weeks while I read fiction and felt all anxious when I came back to it.
[2] Ooh! Solutions!
[3] This morning I skimmed a single paragraph and suddenly realized things weren't making sense and had to go back and reread the paragraph properly and actually think about it before I could go on :-(