Again pure curiosity how do you go about re-inventing qunatum mechanics (well without creating a new universe first).

Also as it is an area I am intrested in how are you planning on re-inventing the transitor. Do you mean looking at new structures or material? As far as I know there are 2 basic transitor structure (bipolar and MISFET) that are trully feesable for current application. There are some more exotic systems such as SET tranistors but I have not seen a practicle application for such technology.

Or are you refering to structual changes such as the fin-FETs or 3D processed films, or maybe more exotic material such as GaAs, TiO2, HgCdTe, etc... Again I realise this is off-topic but I am truly intrested.

You could maybe have a look at herrie

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.0/audio/herrie/

You see. nothing that truly matters to me has any practical application, as far as I know. For instance, who minds if every finite division ring is a field? Do you study physics? About recreating the universe, if I were there at the Creation I would give some advises for the better ordering of it.

My dear archShade. Rereading, I see you have quite misunderstood what I quote above: to invent = to discover in this context. Same with 'reinvent'. The meaning is, to take my example to the realm of computers, that you may very well, and legitimately reinvent the flip-flop. Let's say you have designed a circuit which is just a TTL flip-flop, identical with Texas Instrument's 7474. But you had never heard of it. Yours would be an invention, because you worked independently of the originators. Or a discovery, if you prefer. Of course it would be useless. But you have had fun. That was my whole point. That's what I meant when I said that practically everything I care for is useless, lacking application in real life. In this case my research work is the useless thing. In the case of pure math, the name implies it. That's all, cause I do not want some of my fellow LQers to think I'm a little cuckoo.

I'm currently doing an M.Sc. Microelectronic Engineering, so no I don't study physics in the classical way but it it very important for me to have a decent knowledge in semiconductor device physics (which is in itself a mix of classical physics primarily but not exclusively associated with Maxwell, and some quantum (especially important once you go below a few nm but aspects are needed to understand the simplest transistor).

I think the biggest problem I had was that for me (re-)invent != (re-)discover but that is semantics. I have studied engineering for a while and I will avoid re-inventing/re-discovering something if I can. That’s why papers are there (I'm lucky that I am at a reasonable size university that has good access to journals in EE, physics chemistry, materials, and processing, before that I worked at a reasonably high tech company that had access to a similar range (although more cut down to our area), and before that another university that had access to a wider (if shallower) range of journals (my undergrad university had an entire range of courses, my current is almost exclusively STEM)).

Also as a student of engineering I generally focus on things that have direct applications. That does not mean I don’t appreciate what more abstract people do I just don't like working to far from real systems.

I do not believe any furtherance of human knowledge to be useless just directly applicable or not. Useless has such negative connotations.

Maybe I was not entirely honest with you. I began studing engineering, had a course in FORTRAN IV, bought a pocket programable calculator, got excited with programming, went into the busyness, got interested in the inner workings of a computer (hardware) and, not being able to buy one, bought one of the first microprocessors, around which I was supposed to build a modest computer to assist me in the understanding of some math problems, as how many groups of order N, up to isomorphisms. As the Z80 was NMOS, it would be much faster than the pocket calculator, which was CMOS. When I realized I had to buffer everything, data, address and control, from then on all went "above wheels". I began with a keyboard with only the zero and the one, and a display consisting of eight LEDs for the data bus lines plus seven LEDs for the address bus (128 bytes, the memory was obsolete already at that time). From this humble beginning, the machine grew into 1MB dynamic memory, its controler made by me based on the dynamic RAM data sheets, a Motorola CRT controller for a computer monochrome monitor, and 16 bits data bus (rather unnecessary as I discovered latter but I wanted to do DSP).

So, as you can see, I do not dislike applications. To find the proof of a theorem may fill one with a feeling of satisfaction, but this is also true when your write a program, or design a board with many integrated circuits and it works. As to microelectronics, it must be a fascinating field, with distances tending, as years go by, to enter the spectrum of visible light.

I toyed with CMUS and quite liked it - didn't try playing CDs with it but I bet you could.