The Beauty of Theory

It’s been a long time, I’m sorry. I promise I’ll get back to my usual type of blog posts at some point (I have a long list of topics clogging the pipeline, they’ll all make it out eventually). But I’ve been very preoccupied with a different project recently, so I thought I’d take a minute to talk about it here.

In my very first post, I talked briefly about why I got into physics in the first place, and the reason I gave was that it’s beautiful. That’s always been true, but what I didn’t mention was that that also led me to a certain…incompatibility with most physics outreach content. I grew to really dislike the way people talked about physics to the public, and I especially resented the heavy focus on wildly speculative, hypothetical nonsense when there are volumes and volumes of incredible things we know are actually true just sitting there, unappreciated.

In that vein, for a long time my plan was to eventually write a book called “No Strings Attached” that would cover established, known physics with the same zeal that people put into communicating the wild guesses of frontier research. This was actually part of my motivation for starting this blog in the first place, and now that you know the background, you can probably see its influence on the way I write and the topics I’ve chosen to cover.

Now, that core idea is still floating around in my head and in my notes, but at the same time, parts of it ended up merging with my conviction of the asthetic beauty of the laws of physics, and about a year ago it struck me that the connection I needed was poetry.

The laws of physics are beautiful. As written. On paper. Beautiful…because they are the poetry of Nature, written in her native language of mathematics. When you think of it that way, it’s easy to see how a short verse like

$$\mathbf{F} = m\mathbf{a}$$

could be beautiful, and it’s also easy to see why most people have never seen it that way—because they don’t speak the language.

So that was the seed. Then over the course of about a year, I slowly accumulated component ideas—topics I could cover to show the breadth of beauty in the field—and very importantly, also accompanying poems and elements of poetry to support the connection. And finally, at long last, I reached 10 topics I wanted to talk about, and decided it was time to turn it into something real.

I don’t know why I decided the best format in which to present this project was 10-minute Youtube videos, but that’s what happened. Maybe I just wanted to try something new, I don’t know. But I took it very seriously, I outlined every episode, then worked on getting the production value up as high as I could before publishing. It’s a limited series and a long-time passion project, and even though of course I’ll continue to improve as I produce it, I wanted to make sure I really hit the ground running.

And I’m glad I did. I’ve very much enjoyed the process so far, and I’m very proud of what I’ve made and I’m excited for what’s still on the horizon. So for those interested, you can find the series here:

youtube.com/@TheBeautyOfTheory

and for everyone else, don’t worry, I’ll get back to the usual type of content eventually, and I’ll let you know when I do.

And if you’re here but not interested in any of my content… hi?