MY EXPERIENCE AS STUDENT AND RESEARCHER

Abstract

In the book Jeans used daily language to describe the development of special relativity in 1905, of general relativity in 1915 and quantum mechanics in 1925. I was fascinated. In 1937 the war against Japanese invasion broke out. My family had to move through a long and difficult journey, arriving finally in the Spring of 1938 at Kunming (昆明). I still vividly remember how the train in which we were riding between Wuhan (武汉) and Guangzhou (广州) was bombed midway in Hunan Province (湖南). In Kunming I skipped Grade 12 and took the entrance examination to the Southwest Associated University (Lianda联大). I had not studied high school physics, so to prepare for the entrance examination I borrowed a copy of a standard high school physics textbook and read it through in several weeks. At the end of this reading I concluded that physics was the subject that I liked. Thus when I registered at Lianda I was enrolled in the Department of Physics. I still remember, the textbook stated that the acceleration in a uniform circular motion is centripetal and not along the tangential direction. I felt at first that this contradicted my intuition. But after thinking about it for a couple of days I finally realized that velocity is a vector. It has not only magnitude but also direction. This story taught me an important lesson: We all have intuitions. Most of them are correct, but some need revision. Thus