So you want to be the next Einstein?
Or maybe just a future Quantum Diarist? David Waller tells a frustrated young reader that skipping straight to the hard textbooks isn't the way to go. "If you are going into a university library and randomly pulling books off the shelves, the odds are that you are choosing books that are meant for researchers in a specific sub-field - I would expect these to be far too advanced for 99.9999% of high school students." Instead, read popular science books and accelerate through grade-level books, he writes.
Frederic Deliot emphasizes that physicists must experience the "joy which is at the very heart of the (my) scientific approach and more specifically of the particle physics in my case." David agrees: "Talent in a particular area is nice, but what matters most is passion for the subject."
Peter Steinberg illuminates the elegance of Einstein's equations by comparing them to an iPod: "Innovative products are often not the most complicated to use...Similarly in physics, innovative theories like Special Relativity (and especially the General Theory...) are often subtle, and thus hard to get your mind around at first: but then people realize that they "just work" in describing and predicting aspects of nature."
For those who despair of ever achieving Einsteinian heights, Sandra Leone offers some hope: If Einstein hadn't discovered E=mc2, she writes, "some other scientist would arrive to the same conclusions very soon."
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