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The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

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Re: The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

#121

Post by Someone »

drooglyman wrote: post #95
Someone wrote: post #53

Reminds me of who were on Fourier’s doctoral defense committee: Lagrange, Laplace, and Legendre, who all have a “list of things named after” page on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Jos... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Pie... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Adr...

For what it's worth, I just spent ~10 minutes looking for a solid source on this and couldn't find confirmation. The closest I found was a bio[1], which includes the following: > The Institute set as a prize competition subject the propagation of heat in solid bodies for the 1811 mathematics prize. Fourier submitted his 1807 memoir together with additional work on the cooling of infinite solids and terrestrial and ra…

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-387-98098-0_... states the same, and mentions what I couldn’t find earlier: that they criticized Fourier for his lack of rigour (I remember that as something along the lines of “but if that’s correct, this also is and that can’t be true, can it?”, (with “this” being Gibb’s phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_phenomenon)), but chances are high that isn’t happen, either.

Edit: https://www.comsol.com/blogs/happy-birthday-joseph-fourier/ has more info. If he did a thesis defense (did he?), I guess there’s a decent chance Laplace and Lagrange (his supervisor, according to https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=17981) were there.

Legendre seems doubtful. Weirdly, Legendre doesn’t seem to exist in the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

Edit 2: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16775/16775-h/16775-h.htm#PA... (by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/François_Arago, who was only 18 years younger than Fourier) is the best I can find on this. It says:

“The first memoir of Fourier on the theory of heat dates from the year 1807. The Academy, to which it was communicated, being desirous of inducing the author to extend and improve his researches, made the question of the propagation of heat the subject of the great mathematical prize which was to be awarded in the beginning of the year 1812. Fourier did, in effect, compete, and his memoir was crowned. But, alas! as Fontenelle said: "In the country even of demonstrations, there are to be found causes of dissension." Some restrictions mingled with the favourable judgment. The illustrious commissioners of the prize, Laplace, Lagrange, and Legendre, while acknowledging the novelty and importance of the subject, while declaring that the real differential equations of the propagation of heat were finally found, asserted that they perceived difficulties in the way in which the author arrived at them. They added, that his processes of integration left something to be desired, even on the score of rigour. They did not, however, support their opinion by any arguments.”

Re: The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

#122

Post by max-ibel »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #30

Interestingly, this type of entrenchment has not changed in my opinion. There is always a professor of distinguished, but long forgotten and superseded past-expertise on the orals. They will insist on nuanced competence in an area no longer necessary to forge ahead. They become petty and claw with every breath to maintain relevance, despite all the others on the panel fully aware of the opposite. Academia is a cesspo…

OTOH, I will submit that oral exams can really test familiarity of a subject well.

I found this in my own high school and university orals - I prepared much better for those and probably remember to this day many things I would have otherwise forgotten. I also found the exams absolutely terrifying, there's just no easy way to bullshit your way out. My examiners weren't mean at all.

Lem (of course!) expands on that in his Pilot Pirx stories esp. [1]. He agrees with you ;)

[1] https://royallib.com/read/Lem_Stanislaw/The_Conditioned_Refl...

Re: The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

#123

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #114
my-god-hn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because it was a bunch of nonsense. Wittgenstein has no place in the same sentence as Bertrand Russell.

Wittgenstein is generally considered to be one of most important philosophers of the 20th century, if not the most important. Analytic philosophy has largely lost interest in Russell's works (Kripke was far more important and is generally considered the person who "cleaned" a lot of Russell's deadend projects), while analytic and "continental" philosophy still avidly discuss Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigation…

Don’t worry, the reassessment which happened to Russell will undoubtedly befell Wittgenstein when the time has come. Both worked on the fairly uninteresting part of philosophy anyway.

Re: The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

#124

Post by oh_my_goodness »

psychphysic wrote: post #59
bowsamic wrote: post #2

> In his laboratory work Heisenberg had to use a Fabry-Perot interferometer, a device for observing the interference of light waves, on which Wien had lectured extensively. But Heisenberg had no idea how to derive the resolving power of the interferometer nor, to Wien's surprise, could he derive the resolving power of such common instruments as the telescope and the microscope. When an angry Wien asked how a storage…

I'm not convinced people fail PhD viva all the time. It's only a real fail if they tell you to give up

Traditionally that's the defense, not the oral qualifying exam.

Re: The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

#125

Post by IIAOPSW »

neilv wrote: post #102
ortusdux wrote: post #37

I use to frequent a grad student bar that regularly held an open-mic night for people to practice their defense. It was brutal. A room full of drunk grad and post-grads would try and pick apart your presentation. Targeted academic heckling. It was great. The goal was to get over your fear of the whole process -no matter what, your actual defense would be a better experience.

A comedian friend in LA said something like this is an institution there. You spend months/years hitting these clubs to test and refine a bit, while developing all the skills. Some audience make a sport of the heckling, especially some of the other aspiring comedians. (She said the worst hecklers were the drunk fratbros who imagined themselves comedians, and their own bits were the kind that only their friends would…

Someone once told me I should be a comedian. So if academia doesn't pay me enough, I guess I know where to go next!

Re: The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

#126

Post by Nomentatus »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #114
my-god-hn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because it was a bunch of nonsense. Wittgenstein has no place in the same sentence as Bertrand Russell.

Wittgenstein is generally considered to be one of most important philosophers of the 20th century, if not the most important. Analytic philosophy has largely lost interest in Russell's works (Kripke was far more important and is generally considered the person who "cleaned" a lot of Russell's deadend projects), while analytic and "continental" philosophy still avidly discuss Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigation…

Not based on the Tractatus, however. Which had it's moment but it contains some of the greatest boners ever written. The confusion of probability with simple logic trees is beyond hilarious from a modern perspective.

Re: The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

#127

Post by throwaway81523 »

There is an even scarier story about Heisenberg, from late in WW2. From https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00963402114330... :

> In November 1944, the OSS learned that Heisenberg planned to visit Switzerland the next month. Former major league baseball catcher and then OSS officer Moe Berg was dispatched to Zurich with orders that “Heisenberg must be rendered hors de combat” (out of action) if Heisenberg gave evidence that the German bomb effort was close to completion. Apparently Berg alone was to decide whether or not to kill Heisenberg (Powers, 1993: 391–392).

> With a pistol in his pocket, Berg attended a lecture by Heisenberg, waiting for some sign of an advanced German atomic bomb program. Heisenberg offered no such signal and therefore survived. Instead, Berg reflected on his own “uncertainty principle” in regard to killing Heisenberg, a reference to the scientist’s most prominent contribution to the theory of quantum mechanics (Powers, 1993: 398–399).

> Later that week, as the Battle of the Bulge turned to Allied advantage, Berg attended a dinner given for Heisenberg and heard him lament Germany’s coming loss of the war. This appeared to clinch the case that Heisenberg could not be part of a successful atomic bomb project and effectively ended any further US interest in killing him (Powers, 1993).

Re: The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

#128

Post by thrwoeur2343 »

This is nothing compared to S. Ramanujan.

The man, clearly a genius in mathematics, was also but merely mediocre in his Mathematics classes (and exams) at University. The struggle to be recognized for him must've been quite insane.

"So, you're telling me you're this math genius who can't even ace Math exams ? Yeahhhh right."

Re: The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

#129

Post by sidlls »

vient wrote: post #98
yummypaint wrote: post #84

As a physicist i find this quite comforting. It's good to keep in mind that even the most transformative thinkers in the history of science had reasons to experience impostor syndrome. Einstein famously had a lot of trouble with math as well. No matter how good you are, physics will regularly present you with problems that you can't solve. Statistically speaking, most of the time spent doing science is spent being wr…

> Einstein famously had a lot of trouble with math as well. Isn't it a myth? http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288...

Most definitely a myth. The mathematics of the physics he worked on is not simple. But of course there is also the time honored and long standing friendly animosity between physicist math and "real" math, in which scant few physicists are "good at math."

Re: The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

#130

Post by Maursault »

yummypaint wrote: post #84

As a physicist i find this quite comforting. It's good to keep in mind that even the most transformative thinkers in the history of science had reasons to experience impostor syndrome. Einstein famously had a lot of trouble with math as well. No matter how good you are, physics will regularly present you with problems that you can't solve. Statistically speaking, most of the time spent doing science is spent being wr…

> Einstein

Because everyone knows Einstein was the smartest person that ever lived and the best physicist ever, right? Einstein is only famous because of the press he got, because the press glorified him without knowing why, and everyone read the press. Sure he was bright, but he was also all too human. Everyone thinks he single-handedly changed physics forever while in isolation as a desk clerk at a patent office, but the truth is he stood firmly on the shoulders of giants like Poincaré and Lorentz, not to mention his teacher Minkowski and his friend Grossman. Nearly all of the ideas attributed to Einstein were actually someone elses' ideas. Neither Relativity nor the constancy of the speed of light were Einstein's ideas, and not remotely so. History just gave him all the credit.

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