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by BalinKing
2054 days ago
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One of my Ph 1b (freshman special relativity and electrostatics) quizzes guided you through "discovering" a new method of solving that type of problem. I don't remember the specific details, but it's one of the rare tests I've taken that I actually enjoyed! Although most homeworks and exams aren't nearly that cool IME, they're virtually all about synthesis and fundamental understanding rather than rote memorization. This "first principles" approach to most everything is one of my favorite things about Caltech. |
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Sagan told Thorne he was writing a science fiction novel, needed FTL travel, and asked Thorne if he could suggest something that would be reasonable. Thorne agreed to look into it.
After the conference, Thorne spent a while working on it and came up with a wormhole approach and worked out the physics of it.
In addition to giving it to Sagan, Thorne also put it on the Ph 236 (General Relativity) final exam. He didn't tell the students on the exam that it might imply FTL travel. He just set up the conditions and had them work out the physics. Most of his students succeeded in that, but he was a little disappointed that none of them happened to notice that it implied FTL travel.
(I got the above from an unpublished book Thorne was working on in the early '80s. It was a collection of biographies of and interviews with physicists, astronomers, cosmologists, etc., written and conducted by Thorne. He had the draft chapters and the raw interview transcripts in a world readable directory on the physic's departments VAX, where they were widely read by the rest of us with accounts on that machine).