For the past few months, I’ve been thinking about the following equation.

As a writer, I’ve spent a lot of time crafting sentences and paragraphs. Writing a sentence is easy. Writing a sentence that communicates the idea in your mind to another is much more challenging. The translation from mind to words to mind again is lossy.

If I ask you what comes to mind when you think of physics, what would you answer?

When I was an undergraduate, I did my best to stay away from a computer to do physics. I saw myself as a theorist, and in my head, a good theorist could get everything they wanted done with pencil and paper. I remember one particularly vivid time that I used a computer algebra system to calculate Riemann tensors for my research in gravitation theory, and I hated dealing with the complexity of the program. It wasn’t easy to work with, the answers were often garbled and not simplified, and it almost felt like I was wasting more time using a computer.