my experiences with john baez

i met john baez via the medium of "usenet newsgroups", particularly the newgroups "sci.math" and "sci.physics"...

he was clearly very articulate and knowledgeable... he also struck me as apt to take the "safe", "establishment" side in any dispute, or at least in any scientific or mathematical dispute... even in cases where i had good reason to disagree with the establishment side...

i remember that at some point he posted a message saying that he wouldn't mind hearing from people who had what they thought was some brilliant new theory of physics ...

(i wonder if i can find this message somewhere...)

i had ideas that i wanted to tell someone about, but i didn't think of them as constituting a "brilliant new theory of physics", exactly... it was more that i had found an amazingly simple way to understand some of the brilliant old theories of physics... a way that i thought was probably already more or less understood by everyone who really knew what they were talking about, but which for some reason seemed to be kept secret from beginning students... this is pretty much always the way it is with me; it's what i do... try to find the amazingly simple ways of understanding things that are usually kept secret from the beginning students, so that i can try to teach them... to beginning students...

so the kind of ideas that i wanted to tell someone about didn't exactly match the kind of ideas that he seemed to be looking for, but they seemed close enough... as an unemployed drop-out from a mathematics doctoral program i found it difficult to get anyone in the academic world interested in my ideas, so my standards as to what constitutes a sufficiently receptive audience were set very low...



??something about ... "peculiar early work" / "i want to be famous" ... ??or something... ???....


??something about ... ??being pretty honest about not wanting to (intensively...) work with me... at some points ... ???

[?? a "go-between", apparently, is someone who lies to you about what the other fellow said and then goes back and lies to him about what you said ...

?? butch cassidy ... ?? "the fall will probably kill you" ... ??? ....]