Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
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Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
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Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#2Interesting. And makes me wonder what else we are missing and misunderstanding, as we waste so much time trying to express the complexity of the world in spoken language rather than math. Not just physics but in sociology, psychology, economics etc.
Faraday purely from experiments 30-40 years before Maxwell, intuitively understood electromagnetism. Nobody serious believed it because he didn't have the training to express it mathematically. Dyson is saying it took Physicists another 20-30 years post Maxwell to get it. So basically ~70 years wasted.
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#3Interesting. And makes me wonder what else we are missing and misunderstanding, as we waste so much time trying to express the complexity of the world in spoken language rather than math. Not just physics but in sociology, psychology, economics etc. Faraday purely from experiments 30-40 years before Maxwell, intuitively understood electromagnetism. Nobody serious believed it because he didn't have the training to exp…
> So basically ~70 years wasted.
to call those years wasted implies that we shouldn't have had to wait for them. it suggests that we should look for a way to bypass them.
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#4>We still have passionate arguments between believers in various interpretations of quantum mechanics, the
Copenhagen interpretation, the many-worlds interpretation, the decoherence interpretation,
the hidden-variables interpretation, and many others.
lukcily there has been slight progress since 2007 https://www.quantamagazine.org/frauchiger-renner-paradox-cla...
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#5Interesting. And makes me wonder what else we are missing and misunderstanding, as we waste so much time trying to express the complexity of the world in spoken language rather than math. Not just physics but in sociology, psychology, economics etc. Faraday purely from experiments 30-40 years before Maxwell, intuitively understood electromagnetism. Nobody serious believed it because he didn't have the training to exp…
> So basically ~70 years wasted. to call those years wasted implies that we shouldn't have had to wait for them. it suggests that we should look for a way to bypass them.
I’d rephrase it as: we would probably do ourselves good by coming up with better mathematical intuition and tools of understanding math.
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#6I am struck by the clarity and simplicity of Dyson's writing.
As to the substance: yes, hiding your work under a bushel does nobody any favor, but it's understandable when it feels like the alternative is the strident trumpeting of trivial "advancements".
But also cautionary is the constraints due to the wrong metaphors. We often see this today in linear predictions as to the impact of some new idea. It's easy to mock Ballmer when he laughed at the iphone back in 2007 (back when this essay was written). But his comment made sense for his customer base. He (and nor could Apple) couldn't really see that the game was changing.
Dyson points out that Maxwell himself had the same problem.
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#7Interesting. And makes me wonder what else we are missing and misunderstanding, as we waste so much time trying to express the complexity of the world in spoken language rather than math. Not just physics but in sociology, psychology, economics etc. Faraday purely from experiments 30-40 years before Maxwell, intuitively understood electromagnetism. Nobody serious believed it because he didn't have the training to exp…
> So basically ~70 years wasted. to call those years wasted implies that we shouldn't have had to wait for them. it suggests that we should look for a way to bypass them.
They were wasted if people toiled fruitlessly on the problem. Not necessarily wasted if they were making progress on other problems.
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#8Maxwell did not use vector calculus, which actually makes it pisser to understand because it bypasses having to convert the vectors to coordinates. I find short hand notion more confusing than writing it all out even if the latter takes more room. I did not understand general relativity at all until I saw an example where everything was written out and then it made much more sense
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#9Maxwell did not use vector calculus, which actually makes it pisser to understand because it bypasses having to convert the vectors to coordinates. I find short hand notion more confusing than writing it all out even if the latter takes more room. I did not understand general relativity at all until I saw an example where everything was written out and then it made much more sense
This is something of a myth. Maxwell actually uses both to ease the mathematical pain for his readers - he writes the equations out coordinate by coordinate, and he also compresses them using Hamilton's (quaternion) model of vectors. In fact Maxwell was the one who introduced the gradient, curl, and divergence (actually he used convergence) operators, and he addressed precisely your concern in his book by giving both formulations!
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#10>We still have passionate arguments between believers in various interpretations of quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpretation, the many-worlds interpretation, the decoherence interpretation, the hidden-variables interpretation, and many others. lukcily there has been slight progress since 2007 https://www.quantamagazine.org/frauchiger-renner-paradox-cla...
It seems that this arguably new paradox has some issues: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3975