Member-only story
A Little Light Reading
How nature is telling us something important about the connection between light and gravity
My formal education was extremely haphazard until I reached university. Prior to that, my family had bounced from one country to the next and consequently I bounced from one system of education to the next, quite often delivered in languages I had to acquire quickly in order to have any idea at all of what was being presented to me.
Not surprisingly, I reached the age of fifteen with a disparate grab-bag of knowledge and had to perform a rapid catch-up in order to pass the British O-level and A-level examinations that were the gateway to higher education at that time.
Most of what I learned about mathematics was self-taught, pulled from a variety of textbooks most of which seemed to have been written with the sole purpose of obfuscating their subject-matter or, conversely, making it so dull that the reader would rather commit suicide than plod to the end of yet another tedious chapter.
Yet there was an upside: I learned to conceptualize ideas rather than simply memorize formulae, and because of this I found I could sometimes derive new concepts before encountering them in the standard textbooks. And the more I learned, the more I learned to love Physics because Physics is at heart a never-ending symphony of concepts.
