Well I disagree with many of the book choices, but if there's one thing that's absolutely spot-on is this: >One big problem is that a lot of the popular books written about physics (especially those by famous physicists) are incredibly speculative and tend to present an unrealistic view of what the study of physics is all about. When you're learning physics, it's good to avoid these types of speculative books, and st…
I disagree re: biology and chemistry. Certainly they are epistemically useful simplifications of the other pillars, but they are not foundational or fundamental . Physics is not math because it's an empirical rather than a priori exploration. We are trying to reproduce the function governing natural laws, where in mathematics we are exploring the properties of functions. Computer science in turn is concerned with the…
> simplifications of the other pillars This fallacy is called "reductionism."
It's not universally accepted that it is fallacy. And for whatever it misses, reductionism is a hell of a tool that has been incredibly useful in understanding the world.
Of course, so are chemistry and biology, so blithely dismissed in the parent comment.
> ...the pure joy of understanding the universe around us is one of the most beautiful experiences you can ever have in life. But you do not need to study physics for 25 years in order to understand how the world works. Academic physics that she wants us to learn to undersdand the world is just a new academic subject invented or formalized in the 19. century. Archimedes knew 0 (zero) physics and made huge discoveries…
I think I appreciate the point you are making, but you have gone a little too far in making that point. I've gone through a physics education, and I can attest that one can learn the material, be good at taking exams, and still do a poor job of applying it to the real world. The other extreme is as problematic, though. Knowing certain formalism in mathematics can really help in expressing a physics principle - and at…
> In my education, we were taught matrix inversion a full year before calculus.
Thanks for correcting that. I need to find a better example. What I’m trying to say that is that, the academia or scholasticism teaches you a set curriculum. I think this is not the most productive way of learning. As an analogy, I don’t need to understand and memorize all the symbols of a programming language to write a program. I can have a basic understanding and then I can look up the rest as needed. Scholasticism doesn’t allow this.
I went to university intending to study computing science, but switched to physics half way through under the assumption that you could teach yourself computing science more easily than physics. I wouldn't change what I learned for the world, and I'm now in physics academia, but it's funny how my job these days involves using some of the algorithms, mathematics and data structures that I was just about to start learn…
> I think computing science (not just software engineering) is slowly but surely becoming an essential part of many areas of modern physics research. I like to say that physics, mathematics, and computer science are the three pillars of human knowledge. There's some overlap between each pillar, and we don't yet fully understand how each of them fully relate to the others, but each is essential to gathering a full pic…
Wrong. Philosophy and Mathematics are the real pillars of knowledge. Everything else can be derived from this including physics.
> I think computing science (not just software engineering) is slowly but surely becoming an essential part of many areas of modern physics research. I like to say that physics, mathematics, and computer science are the three pillars of human knowledge. There's some overlap between each pillar, and we don't yet fully understand how each of them fully relate to the others, but each is essential to gathering a full pic…
Wrong. Philosophy and Mathematics are the real pillars of knowledge. Everything else can be derived from this including physics.
Susan Fowler's life story totally impresses me. She is world-renowned for MeToo/Time Person of the Year, but her achievements in physics through sheer will and hard work, even though her upbringings did not give her much in that direction, makes me think there is a movie in it.
I disagree re: biology and chemistry. Certainly they are epistemically useful simplifications of the other pillars, but they are not foundational or fundamental . Physics is not math because it's an empirical rather than a priori exploration. We are trying to reproduce the function governing natural laws, where in mathematics we are exploring the properties of functions. Computer science in turn is concerned with the…
> simplifications of the other pillars This fallacy is called "reductionism."
> simplifications of the other pillars This fallacy is called "reductionism."
It's not universally accepted that it is fallacy. And for whatever it misses, reductionism is a hell of a tool that has been incredibly useful in understanding the world. Of course, so are chemistry and biology, so blithely dismissed in the parent comment.
> Of course, so are chemistry and biology, so blithely dismissed in the parent comment.
I didn't dismiss them at all, I explicitly said they are epistemically useful, but that doesn't entail we should accept them into our core ontology.
> I think computing science (not just software engineering) is slowly but surely becoming an essential part of many areas of modern physics research. I like to say that physics, mathematics, and computer science are the three pillars of human knowledge. There's some overlap between each pillar, and we don't yet fully understand how each of them fully relate to the others, but each is essential to gathering a full pic…
Wrong. Philosophy and Mathematics are the real pillars of knowledge. Everything else can be derived from this including physics.
Philosophy doesn't really produce knowledge, it explores and frames questions. When we accept that the questions define a coherent domain of discourse, we create a field of study that does produce knowledge. This is how natural philosophy became science, and if ethics ever gets to this point, we'll get a moral science which will produce moral knowledge. Ethics doesn't currently produce moral knowledge.
This is very true - I was a physics undergrad and learned to code working in a project at cern. While the underlying physics was the foundation of the project, the day to day work was all coding: processing and analyzing the huge amounts of data coming out of the experiment.
> a physics undergrad Now imagine dozens of people with a PhD in physics doing the same. (Earning a degree in physics is hard.)
yes, that was one of the insights of the work. The people working alongside me were post-docs that were still having to put in their time as workers on other people's research projects. Particularly, in the area of experimental high-energy physics, where accelerators were needed to do the work, everyone had to jockey to get time on the accelerator (even nobel laureates like the leader of the project I worked on). It seemed like every experiment was a compromise of different people's goals in order to combine together to get enough collective clout to get access to the accelerator to even do the project. That meant the guys who had already completed PhDs at prestigious schools were still pretty low on the hierarchy (but ten years older than me). The time spent working with those guys definitely influenced my decision not to continue with a PhD...