Uhm, thats' mostly what Physics research IS.
As an AMEP (Advanced Math Enginering Physics, a hybrid major, w no liberal arts requts
) undergrad, one of my professors was from one of the colleges in Austria (or was it Germany) and spent some of his war years on the manhattan project, tho it wasn't easy to get him to talk about it. It sounded to me like lots of scheduled and ad-hoc meetings, and lots and LOTS of discussions, with lots of trial machining/fabrication work (at that time, 'regular' machinists and tool/die types were common in the field, lots of glass blowing, too, IIRC).
Not that it was that much different in my day - I worked as an hourly in the high energy physics electronics and machine shops, both of which were humming due to DOE funding for (FermiLab) experiments.
Of that austrian professor, by the way - two things I recall:
- He had an irritating habit of not writing down his math proofs/derivations on the black board, which frequently took odd leaps that were not self evident. One student asked him to write more down, to which he nodded, and said 'it's as obvious as 1+1=2" then turned around, and wrote "1+1=2" on the blackboard.
(Please check me on this, I'm not 100% sure whether this happened, or I read it somewhere, but he was a very fast talker, with a thick accent, and so very easily could have been....just checked my library, might have been from the book on V. Weiskopf, "The Joy of Insight", who reminded me a LOT of that professor.)
- He did (I'm certain of this) come up to me after I'd mentioned my concern about physics being too 'mystical' (this was at the time of The Dancing Wu Li Masters type books), and rather pithfully ? said "You should consider working in material science; there are amazing things going on in that field". This was like 1971 or 72? Like an idiot, I did NOT take his advice.
One of my favorite books is J.Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, by Bird and Sherwin - highly recommended, and gives what I thought was a darned good characterization of the pitter patter chitter chatter of the types of discussions involved, but also the minutae like Feynmans' young pranks poking fun at the 'secure' combination locks on safes. Humor and physics, to me, always seemed to go together quite well
tho few others agreed (at the time, anyway).I also read through most of the transcripts of the (HUAC) testimony "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer" 1971, US AEC. Thoroughly disgusting.
That whole time was an era of astounding discoveries and new understandings in math, phsyics, and machining/fabrication technologies (call it material science
- and, given human frailties, esp under such wartime conditions, should probably not be judged too harshly. What happened after, however, is fair game.I can wait for the DVD to come out for this movie, I think.
