/sci/ - Science & Math

So /sci/ I come to you with a personal dilemma that I seek your opinion on. I'm about to be junior in undergraduate, working towards a double major in Physics and Mathematics and (hopefully, I'm starting really late), a minor in computer science. My dilemma is thus: I feel and have felt now that my life's calling is to work in the field of cosmology and quantum physics, and to ultimately be one who works on theories like String Theory and the like. I've been drawn to physics and math since I was in elementary school, when I was always that faggot that checked out whatever books the library had on physics whenever we had library time as our resource hour (they just threw us in a library and we watched a dumb movie and they let us check out books for a week). Now, it's summer break and I've had time to start digging into more advanced stuff on my free time, and just to get a feel for what's in store, I've just been getting on the string theory Wikipedia page (just as a base, I'm not treating the information as doctrine), and I've become maddeningly disheartened every time.

There's simply so many things that I don't know, and to know that I'm already half way done with undergrad doesn't help. Is there really that much left to learn (which is the answer I'm hoping for), or am I behind (which I don't really think is the answer)?

Physics and math majors are beseeched to answer. Was there a huge jump from undergraduate to graduate level physics and mathematics? Do I just need patience, or do I need to start doing my own extensive research now? I go to private liberal arts college (whoops), and the physics department is small, but very knowledgeable and experienced, but understaffed and strained (one of our professors actually worked on string theory when it was very hot shit, and now he's just teaching intro classes, what the fuck).

Answers, advice?

A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Departmental Manager were on their way to a meeting. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do?

"I know," said the Departmental Manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."

"No, no," said the Hardware Engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."

"Well," said the Software Engineer, "Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."

>>5620570
That's no big deal if you use the hardest metal known to man:
Diamond.

Two unrelated questions /sci/.

1) Why isn't the barycentric reference frame of the universe considered as the absolute reference frame?

2) In Shannon's Theory of Information, (and also in the Holographic Principle, I believe), why is information considered discrete? Why does it have to be in bits that can only have a finite number of values? Why can't bits have continuous values?

Yeah I know 2) has more than 1 question but it is mostly the same one rewritten in different terms so that I'm sure to be well understood.

>>3784582
I lold