ddB - you just came sooo close to a direct quote of Richard Feynman I wonder if you're read him or watched/heard his lectures? He was quite a wild-man on the side.
He was famous for that saying, and being one of the very few who could explain science to anyone.
One of my personal heroes. I've got his lectures somewhere (but not yet online, you know, that copyright stuff).
About the only thing you can't quite explain in English is quantum wave function stuff. This is probably because Schrödinger’s wave equations aren't derived in the first place - they were guessed at - a long chain of "assume this, then assume that, then, don't the answers look like what we think we observe?". Richard Greene's "The Elegant Universe" (the best of his books IMO) has a go at how to intuit all that - but it's more of a decent attempt than a true success. It's also the best general/special relativity explanation I've ever seen, really makes it seem like you can "get it". All the while talking about string/brane theory, which is well, kind of out there (but I hope some version is right as it implies a lot of neat things - faster than c travel for one, teleportation, and bunch of things guys with a reputation at stake will never mention... If there really are N extra dimensions rolled up small - then in those we are already everywhere at least in those, and the Buddhists were right in a sense - and them collapsing could have provided the energy for X,Y,Z and time to expand... which again no one with a rep they worry about will say, but it's obvious if you study the theories.)
What I find disturbing in the one book I have that explains the chain of logic behind those wave equations
(which takes 15 pages) is that at the end, they throw away the phase of a complex number, keeping only the amplitude.
Then the rest of science says "since we don't know just where something is (phase), then god plays dice". Well, duh, if you toss out the info, why complain when you don't have it? Sooner or later someone (maybe me, with some math more-expert help) will fix that little problem...
The analogy is if you change a time series to a frequency series (Laplace or Fourier analysis, change a wave form into a spectrum) you get a set of complex outputs (A + Bi) - The root sum of squares is the "amplitude" and the arctan(A/B) is the phase. Discard that, and change back, and you don't get the original waveform at all - time matters!
I'm a huge dead-tree book fan, and find that the earlier books are in general better - we've had too many generations of the blind leading the blind now. All the new stuff is so specialized and off in some corner they think they've invented stuff we've known since 1940 - I see this many times a year. At some point I should make a list of the really good ones, but they are so rare - it's an issue.
I find them at used bookstores and estate sales, not Amazon. Man, some of those old guys were darn clever - imagine making a steam engine with almost nothing but cast iron and horsehide (piston rings!). Now we have stainless steel and teflon and can't do it much better....I could go on and on and on about that one - self regulating/restarting arc lamps, you name it, and with crap for raw materials. They were head and shoulders above most current scientists.
Back in the day, they knew this stuff - and rather than try to dazzle you with BS and jargon and esoteric math - they tried to get an understanding of it into you and succeeded a lot better.
Of course, a standing joke around here is that a PhD spends around 7 years solving one problem (it used to have to be an original problem, but that's been relaxed to almost plain engineering), while an engineer solves many problems a week and writes a weekly report about them all....
I don't have much dog in that fight - I'm both.
It also seems that for almost all time, physicists have an allergy to writing either pi or c. So they mix electrostatic, electromagnetic, and SI units in their equations (which have those constants hidden in them) - and then they don't tell you which units each input is in. Halliday is honest, and provides working cases you can check your own math against - I've even built a small cyclotron off the math in that book, it's simple now that I know how they tend to "cheat" to make the equations look elegant.
You guys might actually enjoy reading that one...it's well written, you'll have fun learning how things work at the very deepest level, I think.
