221–230 of 237 posts
“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself” ―Albert Einstein
Feynman also said: "Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize." [1] Showing a limitation of the maxim or Feynman's hubris? [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
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But I think that's the deeper point of the "if you can't explain it, you don't understand it": Sure, you can write down the equations, but then what exactly have you done? You wrote down some string of characters and showed that it can be derived from some other strings of characters by applying a series of arbitrary-looking rules. By itself, that doesn't tell anything. It's only when you manage the connect formula t…
> You wrote down some string of characters and showed that it can be derived from some other strings of characters by applying a series of arbitrary-looking rules. At this point it's turtles all the way down.
You have to arbitrarily decide where to end: typical 5-year-old, typical high-school student, typical math professor.
What people mean by "simple terms" is "simple terms that I understand".
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Understanding the fine details is one thing, but unless you can really communicate a synthesis or an analogy, it's impossible to really prove you understand something. Nobody cares about a genius who understands something until he can really interact about the subject. Humans work with communication. When you learn about something, you read about it and you process it. To see if you understand it, you must communicat…
I care that the people at CERN can make a working LHC, not that they can communicate it to me succinctly (eg, in under 2 hours). It's fine that it takes 150-300 hours of back-and-forth communication to transfer the ideas behind how it actually works. That seems like a reasonable amount of time to communicate a complex idea to a novice. There's also layers of understanding: The LHC bangs two rocks together hard to see…
And do you really expect politics to raise funds for such a project if nobody can explain to them what they are doing?
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I care that the people at CERN can make a working LHC, not that they can communicate it to me succinctly (eg, in under 2 hours). It's fine that it takes 150-300 hours of back-and-forth communication to transfer the ideas behind how it actually works. That seems like a reasonable amount of time to communicate a complex idea to a novice. There's also layers of understanding: The LHC bangs two rocks together hard to see…
But how do you really know if the LHC works? You need people to communicate with each other. And do you really expect politics to raise funds for such a project if nobody can explain to them what they are doing?
That's okay: politicians don't actually need to know how it works, they need to know why they should build it -- which is a) something they have domain expertise in and b) a much easier question.
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Some parts of physics might stretch the ELI5 to its limits. I like to explain science to my non-science friends, but I'm always hitting the issue that parts of the specialized knowledge become intuitive, and then it's difficult to go back. Say, my understanding of how electrons behave in matter is a category on its own (let's call it quantum), and it's difficult to translate to common terms.
The more I try to learn physics, the more I need to see the mathematics to understand the ideas. Without the math, I don't believe it is possible to break beyond the surface 'armchair' level of understanding.
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Now I want to invent a hominid that intuits probability.
Humans intuit probability. We just do it very badly.
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> You wrote down some string of characters and showed that it can be derived from some other strings of characters by applying a series of arbitrary-looking rules. At this point it's turtles all the way down.
No. That's what it looks like if you only look at the formula. (And why I'd say that formulas are not an "objectively simple way of expressing something*) If you can somehow keep in mind what the formula is supposed to represent, the operations on characters will let you find some insight about that thing and will stop standing only for itself.
Also, mathematical formulas are essentially a different language. If people don't speak it, then it's a moot point.
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A math formula is one of the objectively simplest ways of expressing something. But it's not easily understood unless you know the math well, thus violating Gruber's rule. Feynman was honest about this, because magnetism can be explained very simply, but not in any familiar way to things most people already know about. At least as good as math (and capturing the objective complexity better I think) is a working progr…
Well an equation is certainly the more precise way of describing something, but not really the simplest. My most vivid memory of this is my Automata class; the instructor led with the equations before describing in plain language. Take push down automata as an example [1]. The equations are found in the formal definition, but the informal definition is much clearer. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushdown_automa…
As you say, informal explanations are great for understanding and bringing clarity, a lot of the time they're just used to help expand the unfamiliar math, but also a lot of the time they trade off precision, conciseness, or accuracy. At worst they complicate things with twists and relations in the informal explanation that don't exist in the real deal. Sometimes that might be helpful in the same way technically unrelated mnemonics are but it's important to point them out.
The conflation of simple, easy, concise, precise, clear, intuitive.. is the root of the issue when discussing what makes a good explanation.