Start of PH404 "Revision"

This week is dedicated to PH404 - always likely to have been my favorite element of the course this year and so a nice week of work. I have sketched out some recent exam questions that I would have been expected to do from and outlined some sort of possible answer for each. Then the starting text for my actual revision notes is based on a rough reading of one of the many textbooks I looked at over the year. So far, outlines of points on Kepler, Tycho and Newton have been prepared.

I can't believe it has really been 8 months since I was in Italy and started doing some reading for my course - The Cambridge Companion to Galileo.

The most surprising thing has been that prior to the course I would have said that on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the knowledge of a professor of history of science like, say, John Milton, then I would have said that I was a 7 due to my lifelong reading on the subject. But now I perhaps think of myself as having been a 3/10.

One recent book that has attracted a lot of attention was called something like Outliers. It concerned those who have achieved great things in various fields and was meant to illustrate the thesis that to become really expert in something requires about 10,000 hours of work - three or four years of full time study. I have realised that I don't have the hours and so am not good enough - or as good as I thought

And this links in with the thoughts I have had of doing a PhD. I have been surprised to discovery that these now take around 4 years on average and that PhD students work at them very much like you would in a full time job. 50 hours a week for 48 weeks a year for 4 years = 9,600 hours. I don't know if I do have what it takes to do a PhD.

I have returned to this theme on many occasions during the course with no clear resolution.