A Book On The New Physics, If

A Book On The New Physics, If Not Purely Descriptive Of Experimental Work, Must Essentially Be Mathematical.

I Think It Is A Peculiarity Of Myself That I Like To Play About With Equations, Just Looking For Beautiful Mathematical Relations Which Maybe Don't Have Any Physical Meaning At All. Sometimes They Do. At Age 60.

What Makes The Theory Of Relativity So Acceptable To Physicists In Spite Of Its Going Against The Principle Of Simplicity Is Its Great Mathematical Beauty. This Is A Quality Which Cannot Be Defined, Any More Than Beauty In Art Can Be Defined, But Which People Who Study Mathematics Usually Have No Difficulty In Appreciating.

The Physicist, In His Study Of Natural Phenomena, Has Two Methods Of Making Progress: (1) The Method Of Experiment And Observation, And (2) The Method Of Mathematical Reasoning. The Former Is Just The Collection Of Selected Data; The Latter Enables One To Infer Results About Experiments That Have Not Been Performed. There Is No Logical Reason Why The Second Method Should Be Possible At All, But One Has Found In Practice That It Does Work And Meets With Reasonable Success.

Renormalization Is Just A Stop-gap Procedure. There Must Be Some Fundamental Change In Our Ideas, Probably A Change Just As Fundamental As The Passage From Bohr's Orbit Theory To Quantum Mechanics. When You Get A Number Turning Out To Be Infinite Which Ought To Be Finite, You Should Admit That There Is Something Wrong With Your Equations, And Not Hope That You Can Get A Good Theory Just By Doctoring Up That Number.