Eureka!

i'm sure most of you would know the famous story of how Archimedes, when he worked out the principle of bouyancy, shouted "Eureka" and ran around the city naked (he was taking a bath when he worked it out...). i had my own 'Eureka-moments'. though i did not exactly run around the town naked (cos it would have been too tortorous for the people around... and my 'discoveries' weren't as impressive).

i was reminded about one of my 'Eureka-moments' by this entry in XH's blog. i remember i had the longest time understanding the mathematical shorthand for quantum Physics that Dirac won the Nobel prize with. basically, he used a symbol to represent a kind of vector which he called the 'ket'. the inverse of a ket is , Dirac called a bra. when you put the two together, you get a bra-ket (for rationale and a sense of Dirac's warped sense of humour, see XH's post).

of course, this took me a damn long time to understand what the flying hell was it all about, particularly the bra-vector... and how it all relates to quantum mechanics (don't ask me how it does now.. i can't remember...). and when i did, i had my 'Eureka moment'. at that precise moment, i happened to be talking to my ex-girlfriend over ICQ. and in my Eureka-induced madness, i excitedly typed: "yeah!!! i've finally gotten my head around the bra!"

the other time i had a 'Eureka moment' was in my UCL days when my X-ray diffractometer which i constructed finally worked (after a month and a half of frustration from trying to tweak it and getting it to work...). that time, i ran through the entire department telling all those who would care to know...