Educating Carlton: Preamble

Some time ago there was a news story about an astronomy feature that elicited quite a bit of chatter in the discussion that followed about Einstein’s theories. As is the nature of such public things, there was a lot of useless input from people who couldn’t possibly understand the ongoing discussion, so they couldn’t possibly have input, so they did what they could do, distract. There were, however, several people with meaningful input. Among that group is Carlton. Carlton is an amateur astronomer and seems pretty well versed in the down to earth, practical sciences. Of course the discussion deals with a lot of theoretical physics, which is anything but down to earth and practical, being theoretical and all. I thought it might be nice to set out some things that might bring people up to speed, if they are as interested and already knowledgeable as Carlton is. This is by no means a substitute for real instruction. I’ll treat things with broad strokes, so a lot of explanations won’t stand under scrutiny from someone who really knows this stuff. It’s not written for the instructor. I’ll use a lot of examples from more everyday life and hope that the lines are close enough to parallel to make sense of things. I don’t know how long this will take, nor how long between installments. I also don’t plan on staying up nights to make progress here, so if anyone is actually reading this and doesn’t think I’m posting fast enough, you can always get a podcast for a dozen or so courses on math, physics, astronomy, etc. and then once you’ve gotten a bit of mastery over the understood aspects, get some on theory, method, development. You’ll be better off going that route, I assure you.