World Science Scholars

1.5 Gravity’s Messenger

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    • Einstein was known for visualizing his ideas and theories, and for creating simple but powerful thought experiments to explain the concepts he pioneered. Do you rely on visualizations to understand difficult scientific concepts? How do you wrap your head around the challenging topics you have studied?

    • I often think non verbally and in visualizations. It can be hard to express my ideas to others, but when I finally figure out how to verbally express my ideas, I often gain new insight.

    • Visualizations are a key to understanding an otherwise complex subject. So, even when I studied maths, I used to transfer an equation to the corresponding curve (and do some curve analysis with it), which enhanced understanding significantly. Same thing with relativity (both): Understanding why we don’t experience effects of velocity or varying gravity gets much easier when you draw a simple graph which lets you see immediately what’s going on.

    • Why Gravity is a type 2 metric tensor field ??

    • Certainly. I have a notebook and pencil for these WSU courses. In that notebook I draw rough models in addition to calculations.

    • Visualization is essential for my understanding. Repetition aids any of my studies. I can’t count the how many times I have watched every episode of World Science Festival on YouTube. Muscle memory works and once I feel I have a grasp on a concept, I will research and obsess over it until my inquisitive nature is satisfied, as temporary as that satisfaction might be.

    • Intuitive understanding makes it look worth.Developing such understanding involves visualization,analogies,mathematics and everything.

    • Yes, visualizations help in some cases to understand concepts, and much more those that I imagine in my mind. What I do is create an outline drawing in my mind, and I see it completely clear

    • Similar concept has been discribed in Indian vedas when Lord Narayan sleeping on sarpent in sea. In which sea is pool of different energies, energy passing in the form of waves.

    • GR

    • I am not very good at using analogies, but I love when other people use them. I liked the analogy of an introvert friend leaving a party as a way to visualize gravitational wave frequency.

    • I use the mind to internally visualise the concept and recite the facts. It is not that I need to visualise it to understand but that in visualising it the concept can be observed at will and in a sense be unbounded by imagination.

    • Oh yes, I’m visual thinker.

    • Yes I think visually, but I wish I could do thought experiments in my head.

    • Thought experiments were like solving geometry. Only this time, spacetime was a concept created by the very person who thought of it, and so his understanding were conceived by the very nature of the universe.

    • Visualizations help me clarify concepts

    • I often rely on demonstrations and contextualizing own ideas

    • I have been trying without success to visualize spacetime warped by mass – two dimensional illustrations are all very good and help some, but that doesn’t help me see it the way it is. I know that a black hole cannot be a circluar but must be spherical, but how do I visualize a negative three dimensional sphere? I can put my hands around it but not my eyes.

    • I have used visualizations in my schoolwork since a very young age because I find them t be an easy way to understand the current topic. although my artistic skills are very minimal I can still manage to understand what I was attempting to draw.

    • I believe being involved with studying astrophysics, partical physics since middle school , visualization definitely provided a new dimension to the understanding if concepts . Like even if topics are sometimes hard visualization can make it easir actually easier to understand

    • I would say “yes”, although I think using voice in my head. Some people use images to think, for example they count not with voice but imagining slides with numbers in their head, visually. This makes a big difference depending on what you’re trying to solve – it’s much easier to do math if you can represent the symbols visually in your head than just saying “two plus two equals four” as spoken words in your head. Few people understand this and think that you’re a moron simply because you have a different representation in your head and you appear “slow” in math precisely because of that representation.

    • I use all types of senses from audio, and visual to kinesthetic to understand scientific concepts. I take other concepts or conceptualized theories from other domains and work them into the principles discussed. This cements, the wave of thought where it needs to be. I try my best to capture these thoughts in the respective valve, and then I circle back to these ideas later on as I gain more insight into a topic, or have other fields that I can reference to build upon the previous thought. Getting my thought down into words also helps, either in writing on pen and pad or in this window. This helps to structure my thoughts in a manner that is conducive, and constructive for others.

    • Hello Ladies and Gentlemen,

      Visual clarity of topics is a good way to learn.

      Charts, displays, the visual learning helps.

      Other learnings are auditory and kinetic-very good for autistic people`s internal learning mindset.

      Black boards fill classrooms for a reason, but reading is also effective. After 20 minutes of reading, we relax. It is a secret of religions. It is a synaptic, relax response to reading.

      Anything.

    • Is the math just an elaborate way to describe what Einstein, Newton and the rest saw in their mind. For instance another dimension exists in my mind in which all things in the universe are not only in our four detectable dimensions, but also have a line that connects them all together. From that thought comes my realization that all things are in fact Quantum Entangled, but from our spot we can’t see or measure the affect. And no I can’t describe that with my current math skills.

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