To Become A Theoretical Physicist ... You

Although Humans Have Existed On This Planet For Perhaps 2 Million Years, The Rapid Climb To Modern Civilization Within The Last 200 Years Was Possible Due To The Fact That The Growth Of Scientific Knowledge Is Exponential; That Is, Its Rate Of Expansion Is Proportional To How Much Is Already Known. The More We Know, The Faster We Can Know More. For Example, We Have Amassed More Knowledge Since World War Ii Than All The Knowledge Amassed In Our 2-million-year Evolution On This Planet. In Fact, The Amount Of Knowledge That Our Scientists Gain Doubles Approximately Every 10 To 20 Years.

Beyond Work And Love, I Would Add Two Other Ingredients That Give Meaning To Life. First, To Fulfill Whatever Talents We Are Born With. However Blessed We Are By Fate With Different Abilities And Strengths, We Should Try To Develop Them To The Fullest, Rather Than Allow Them To Atrophy And Decay. ... Second, We Should Try To Leave The World A Better Place Than When We Entered It.

No One Knows When A Robot Will Approach Human Intelligence, But I Suspect It Will Be Late In The 21st Century. Will They Be Dangerous? Possibly. So I Suggest We Put A Chip In Their Brain To Shut Them Off If They Have Murderous Thoughts.

There's The Caveman In Us. The Caveman In You Says, "i Want Direct Contact. I Don't Want A Picture." The Caveman In Our Body Says Once In A While, We Have To Go Outside. We Have To Meet Real People, Talk To Real People, And Do Real Things.

The Strength And Weakness Of Physicists Is That We Believe In What We Can Measure. And If We Can't Measure It, Then We Say It Probably Doesn't Exist. And That Closes Us Off To An Enormous Amount Of Phenomena That We May Not Be Able To Measure Because They Only Happened Once. For Example, The Big Bang. ... That's One Reason Why They Scoffed At Higher Dimensions For So Many Years. Now We Realize That There's No Alternative.