In Surrey University, BSc students in the final year are required to do a kind of research called the Final Year Project. This year, I took two students to supervise. I gave one of them the review project on the Dirac equation, which is not so difficult to supervise because it is a quantum theory. Topics from Quantum Mechanics are easy to handle to me because all of my research are from it. However, many students are interested in Black Holes for some reasons. Having considered this "demand from the market", I decided to give the other project on the theory of black hole this year.... which was my big mistake.
Personally, I did not spend much time to learn this subject. I think many physics students and academics have similar experiences as mine, except very few. This is because the gravitation theory cannot give us many jobs, unlike Quantum theory. In modern Universities, the emphasis is placed on mastering quantum mechanics and its applications. As a consequence, very few students seriously study the gravitation theory, or the general theory of relativity.
It is, again, J. Wheeler, who motivated me to go for the theory of Black hole... I mean I don't know him personally,
but I have been influenced by his papers, works, books and articles, directly and indirectly. For instance, my current research as a theoretical nuclear physicist is to solve the Hill-Wheeler equation through a numerical approach for the nuclear wobbling motion; It is when I was a high-school student that I learned to know he was the supervisor of R. Feynman, by reading the famous book "surely, you're..."; and as a fatal blow, my former supervisor in Tokyo recommended me to read Wheeler's recent self-biography book "Geons....", which I've read it a few months ago.
You can tell easily from this book that Wheeler is a genius and a real theoretical physicist: his carrer started from nuclear physics, then particle physics (the famous collaboration with his "PhD student" about the QED) and gravitation theory (naming of the "black hole" was given by Wheeler, and his predictions of gravitational wave and worm holes are famous), and finally recently he arrived at quantum computation and quantum information theory! (David Deutsch is his fomer student!)
Well, I am a nuclear physicist. Particle physics is the thing I am already interested in and sometimes apply the concepts into nuclear physics, but the gravitation theory?? I took a lecture of Prof. Ezawa in Tohoku and of Prof. Eguchi in Tokyo. It was nearly ten years ago when I took these lectures.... So, naturally, I don't remeber what the Einstein's equation is as well as the Christoffel symbol... But If Wheeler did before, maybe I can ..... is the starting point of my mistake. It is true, however, that I enjoy relearning this "new" subject a lot. I hope my FYP student also enjoy this subject.
