MU-6: Theoretical Physics
As maths became the only way to talk about physics, it led to the rise of theoretical physics. After all, you could work out the maths and its implications in your armchair without doing any experiments yourself! As Walter Isaacson wrote in his book titled Einstein : “(Theoretical physics) pioneer practitioners – such as Max Planck, Hendrik Loretz and Lutwig Boltzmann - combined physics with math to suggest paths where experimentalists had yet to tread.” But of course, physics needs the experimentalists too. As Mark Jackson wrote : “Without theorists, experimentalists would not have anything to test. Without experimentalists, theorists would not have anything to explain.” Yet over the last century or so, all the rock stars of the physics world are theoretical ones, from Albert Einstein to Heisenberg and Schrodinger to Feynman to Stephen Hawking. Such is that dominance that Richard Feynman once remarked: “Theoretical physics is a human endeavour, one of the higher developm...