Francis Mont's Blog, page 14

Physics

The first event in my life, suggesting that I would become a Physicist, happened when I was eight years old. My big brother was already building radios, and I asked  him to teach me. He explained the components. He got as far as ‘condenser’. When I asked him what it was, he started telling me about electric charges, but when I asked him what they were, he had to backtrack and tell me about electrons. When I demanded to know what electrons were, he gave up on me. I never built the radio.

            I became interested in science in high school, when I realized I could actually use it in my own life. Two incidents stand out.

            A very deep cave on the hill near my home fascinated us kids when I was sixteen. The cave went vertically down; impossible to climb into, and the kids in the neighbourhood made wild guesses about its depth. I put an end to the guessing game, days after we learned the Newtonian equations of gravitational free-fall. All I had to do was drop a stone and count the seconds until it landed. I was much admired by my classmates. Naturally, that success made a deep impression on me.

            A couple of years later, I wanted to go on a hiking trip with two friends, and we needed a tent. My father had a huge old army tent, badly damaged by mildew. Still large parts of it were in good condition, so we decided to make a new tent from the sound fabric.

            I used fairly complicated trigonometry and calculus to figure out the maximum size of the tent we could make from the available material, providing a large enough floor-space for three to sleep on and sufficient height for getting in and out. When we started cutting, we weren’t sure whether it would work. After all, it was only math! It worked! We made a beautiful new tent out of an old wreck. After that, I was sold on science.

            After high school I planned to be a science teacher, so I enrolled in the University of Science in Budapest. I was working on my Teacher's Diploma in Mathematics and Physics, with only two years left, when Einstein ruined everything. He started telling me how time is relative and space is warped and how I can take a trip of a few weeks and come back hundreds of years later.

            This was all utter nonsense. Still, coming from Einstein himself, I couldn't entirely dismiss it. I decided to deal with it once and for all. So I transferred from the teacher's program to a graduate course in Physics and set out to prove Einstein wrong. Or at least find out what the hell he was talking about.

            I didn’t like the way they taught us Physics. The University’s aim was to train us to be useful members of the workforce: competent in calculating parameters of electronic circuits, of stresses in bridges and tall buildings, of the speed of semiconductor switches in computers. The purpose of the graduate course was definitely not to teach us how the world is put together and what is the essence of basic principles. I found this out, too late, after I graduated.
 
            My ambitions were modest: first, to develop my Unified Field Theory (a single equation explaining the Universe); then, to provide the theoretical foundation for an anti-gravity device that would revolutionize science and technology, incidentally creating Heaven on Earth.

With the ink still wet on my diploma, I stood in the job placement center, talking to an increasingly frustrating counsellor. Though I had already told him what I wanted, he was obstructive.

“I have here a position in the light-bulb factory; you could work on developing a longer-lasting filament,” he suggested.

“No”, I said firmly.

“Well, how about developing a better-insulating transistor-casing”, he tried again. “I have two positions there”.

“No” I said, starting to lose patience.

“The Geophysical Institute is looking for physicists” he offered. “They provide rubber boots...”

I snorted.

“I've got it!” he exclaimed. “A good position in the cheese factory. They need someone to measure viscosity.”

I said nothing. He glanced at my face and quickly looked away.

After a while, he said very quietly, making sure nobody heard: “You could join the first computer company in Budapest. They are looking for anybody with a scientific background. You wouldn't do physics, but – he looked around even more carefully, lowered his voice even further and leaned quite close to my ear - this could be your ticket out. Sooner or later they would have to send you abroad. In the West, you could research whatever you liked.”


So I did and arrived in Canada a year later. I have been having fun with both Physics and computers ever since…..”