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Brian Greene

University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.

Email: cll@utulsa.edu

Editor's note: Chris Liner is a faculty member in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Tulsa and author of the books Elements of 3-D Seismology (PennWell Publishing Co., 1999), and Greek Seismology, available free from Samizdat Press. When not engaged in the serious business of teaching and research, he can often be caught playing with computers and reading really old books.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

My undergraduate degree is in geology, and there are reasons for this. First of all, my foray into entomology (bugs) was ill-fated since I was squeamish around creepy crawly things. It took a year to find this out, but that is another story. The switch to geology was natural as I had two older brothers (Jeff and Robert) already majoring in rocks. Unlike a real geologist, I tolerated fieldwork and microscope work and rock cutting work rather than embrace it. What caught my fancy was mathematics and physics, so I gobbled up all I could stomach. In all likelihood, graduation saved me from running into my math ceiling. We all have a limit to what we can understand in mathematics, and physics is just mathematics pointed at the universe. Later, in graduate school, I bumped the ceiling pretty hard—something called Lesbegue integration—and then took comfort in knowing my limits.

I remember attending a seminar in about 1977 on "Deriving Maxwell's Equations from Local Gauge Invariance of Quantum Mechanics." The details escaped me (whoosh, they flew by), but I understood what the speaker was trying to say. The mathematical basis of electromagnetism, Maxwell's equations, could be extracted from another theory, quantum mechanics. That means quantum mechanics is the more fundamental theory, and all the diverse physics of electromagnetism (chemistry, optics, etc.) was somehow bundled up in the very compact mathematical structure of the quantum theory.

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."

—Francis Bacon, 1561–1626, The Essays

My preparation for this amazing insight came several years earlier from reading a thick biography of Albert Einstein. I remember as a high school student lugging the Einstein with me to visit a doctor about a football injury. . . . [Full Text of this Article]