Re: another "Einstein" role model turned brain dead

morrisjcroy@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
One of my undergrad classmates aced everything that the profs threw at him.
He'd sleep during lectures and didn't have to study at all. But it
caught up with him. During our senior year, he wasn't firing on all
cylinders and started flamling out. The result was that while most of us
were finished in four years, he stayed on a bit longer.


Most of the really drunk/stoned whiz-kids I knew of who did very well
in undergrad, typically crash and burned when they were in graduate
school. The problems typically started after they passed all the
weedout exams (ie. prelims, comps, etc ...) and had to start doing
original research work. I suppose it was always easier to drink booze
and/or smoke weed all day, instead of working diligently on research.
Their arrogance, laziness, and strategy of "winging it" on exams was
no longer effective when doing research.


Some whiz-kids impose very high unrealistic expectations on
themselves, such as beating Einstein and/or Feynman at their own
game. I've come across many young physics whiz-kids who were always
talking about coming up with a unified field theory and/or a "theory
of everything".

Ka-boom and ker-splat!


Over the last 20+ years, the physics whiz-kids who were into the
"theory of everything" stuff typically went into areas like string
theory. Many eventually find out the hard way that string theory is a
very difficult research problem to work on, and that tons of really
smart folks all over the world are all working on it. Just keeping up
with the current literature in the field is practically like a full-
time job.

On an unrelated subject, I found and picked up an old algebra textbook
at a thrift shop today. It turns out to be an old grade 13 algebra
textbook they use to use here in the 1960's. What's odd is that this
book covers all kinds of abstract stuff like set theory, group theory,
rings + fields, vector spaces, etc ... type of algebraic structures.
These days hardly any high school algebra textbooks cover anything
abstract like algebraic structures. The rest of the book looks
identical to a freshman university linear algebra textbook (ie.
vectors, matrices, planes, complex numbers, etc ...). The first few
sections cover stuff like permutations, combinations, and basic
probability theory. (By the time I was in high school and taking
grade 13 algebra, we were using a dumbed down later edition of the
textbook written by the same authors. It didn't include anything like
algebraic structures like groups, rings, fields, etc ...).

.

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