arachnid

Hi, I am currently living in Wales, UK, but I am from the US. My background is in engineering, mainly industrial and systems engineering. Industrial engineering conjures up images of people with stop watches prowling dark satanic mills at the behest of evil capitalists seeking to make us into their wage slaves. Now-a-days, industrial engineering is all about statistics, operations research, mathematical modeling, and human factors engineer and ergonomics. Industrial engineers can be found working in just about any business or technical field. My specialties are program (or programme in the UK) management, and performance measurement and modeling. I have an abiding interest in physics. I recently finished Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's book titled "Why does E=MC Squared and Why Should We Care" I recommend it as a very readable introduction to relativity. I was so impressed, I bought another book by the two authors on quantum physics. I understand that quantum physics is spectacularly successful, but it leaves me feeling that it is all too artificial. The math may agree very well with experimental results, but it doesn't seem to explain very much about what is actually happening. I know it is said that a desire to understand what is happening in quantum mechanics is unnecessary and counter-productive, but I refuse to accept that. Fortunately, I don't use QM in my work so I can afford to take that extreme view.