[HN Gopher] What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact p...
___________________________________________________________________
What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists
(2016)
Author : raattgift
Score : 462 points
Date : 2022-04-04 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| paulpauper wrote:
| They are paying her fees comparable to lawyers. of course she is
| going to be patient.
|
| _'Talk to a physicist. Call me on Skype. $50 per 20 minutes.'_
|
| lol i am not poor and that still seems like a lot to me.
|
| This is what irked me about the article. They are making it seem
| like this is some sort of charity or altruistic endeavor. It's a
| business.
| gowld wrote:
| She charges very little for what she offers.
|
| Memmo.me charges $50 per _minute_ and up.
|
| > I now have a small team of consultants on the 'talk to a
| physicist' service. None of us makes great money, and I don't
| think we ever will because the market is too small. But broken
| down to dollars or euros per hour, I've had many freelance
| writing jobs that paid worse.
| fatbird wrote:
| $150/hour is pretty cheap for a lawyer these days. But even
| still, a lawyer has a bachelors and a law degree, while this
| gets 20 minutes talking to someone with a PhD--and in this
| case, someone with a lot of experience both doing physics and
| communicating it. The lawyerly equivalent to Sabine
| Hossenfelder would a partner at a major law firm, whose hourly
| rate is likely around $1,000.
|
| Even if she's now farming it out postgraduates in physics, it
| still seems like a fair price to me.
| Fomite wrote:
| That's half my "I find this project interesting" consulting
| rate.
| Gunax wrote:
| Over 10 years ago I listened to this radio show about a crackpot
| physicist: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/293/transcript
|
| It's fascinating that this is _so_ well known among physicists
| but to those of us outside, we are totally unaware that these
| people exist and that email addresses get deluged.
|
| It seems to be a logical trap: physics is interesting enough to
| attract amateurs but complex enough that no amateur can hope to
| contribute.
|
| Which makes me think the reason biology or sociology doesn't have
| crackpots (or maybe they do... Ive never heard of it though) is
| either that they just are not interesting to the retired
| engineer, or they dont take as many years of intense study.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Non-math fields have more subjectiveness, for one. Second, much
| higher barrier to entry. Someone can investigate something,
| read some relevant literature, and become an amateur historian,
| but the barriers to being competent at math and physics are way
| higher.
| nullc wrote:
| Every sufficiently non-obscure field has crackpots. Most only
| see ones in their own field, but if you end up as a volunteer
| handling the wikipedia email queues, you'll see them across all
| fields.
|
| Some fields have more crackpots and more persistent ones, I
| think it's an open question if that's due to to the field
| itself or how it's presented in the media.
|
| I'm confident that if there are frequent high profile articles
| on the field that talk about "unsolved problems" or
| "fundamental limits" that this acts like crackpot catnip.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Biology has attracted what you might call crackpots
| (particularly in the area of human evolution and evolution in
| general) of all persuasions, some of whom were quite successful
| in their local arenas (Lysenko in the Soviet Union controlled
| the direction of biological research for several decades, much
| to the detriment of Soviet agriculture for example).
|
| Another one I encountered personally was the group of academics
| who got behind the "AIDS is an autoimmune disorder, not a viral
| infection" theory. It was a bit uncomfortable talking to them
| about it, they really had a kind of evangelical / persecuted
| visionary complex. These were people with advanced degrees and
| even a university professor (in chemistry, not biology) was
| involved. A similar small group of academics in paleontology
| continue to deny that an asteroid impact had anything to do
| with the extinction of the dinosaurs, despite vast evidence
| supporting that conclusion.
|
| A common factor seems to be that such people are susceptible to
| ideological fixation. They get ideas in their heads that they
| aren't willing to question, and promoting them becomes more of
| an article of faith rather than something that can be addressed
| by scientific methods.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| They manifest in different ways:
|
| - naturopaths, etc
|
| - fad diets
|
| - cult farming practices
|
| - "real" histories
|
| - pickup artists
|
| Etc.
| Fomite wrote:
| Biology has a _tremendous_ number of crackpots.
|
| The "I disproved Einstein" equiv. is "Here's my cure for
| cancer" (yes, all cancer).
|
| Then there are the anti-Evolution folks.
|
| The AIDS denialists.
|
| The anti-vaccine types.
| kansface wrote:
| > Which makes me think the reason biology or sociology doesn't
| have crackpots ...either that they just are not interesting to
| the retired engineer, or they dont take as many years of
| intense study.
|
| An alternative, cynical interpretation is that crackpots are
| indistinguishable from the ordinary output of some fields.
| wallfacer120 wrote:
| I don't share the conviction of many in these comments that "is",
| and "is modeled by" are clearly different concepts, or that
| distinction is the source of hubris or ignorance about science.
|
| Moreover, I don't see any of the science communicator bad guys
| being mentioned in the comments saying "remember everyone, you
| DON'T have to understand math to practice high level theoretical
| physics." I don't think its on those communicators to explain
| this to people.
|
| People are allowed to have interests in stuff that they don't
| have a practitioners knowledge of, which is good because I'm sure
| that you have interests and opinions in fields that you don't
| practice or never studied as well.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Brilliant! We should all start thinking more charitably of those
| who paddle in the shallows of our fields.
|
| As Sabine Hossenfelder says "Who knows, we might be the first to
| hear .."
|
| But also it's good to be good to others.
| paulpauper wrote:
| it's not charity though. she is charging a lot of money, about
| the same as a lawyer.
| bsedlm wrote:
| well, but she's kinda famous, so she can do it, I suppose
| less famous physicist could still provide similar service for
| less (like a less prestigious law firm)
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Responding charitably, as in with a loving, understanding
| attitude, not with charity on the sense of a handout.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| this kindness and empathetic thinking is at the core of real
| educational theory, in some cases.. worthy
| dav_Oz wrote:
| A very thoughtful piece by Sabine.
|
| My advice to college freshmen is to consider universities as a
| place for meaningful interaction between explorers at different
| stages. The "learning" (curriculum) part is just a prerequisite
| done (mostly) all by yourself (through exercise) at your study
| desk. At the campus you show up prepared to be able to engage
| with the community (of peers, graduates, postgraduates,
| professors ...) as you climb up the ranks yourself. At its heart
| it is very much a social endeavor. But ime especially in physics
| or mathematics this is much less emphasized. Maybe understandably
| so in order to encourage working on a "simple" problem for weeks
| on end ("frustration tolerance") and not to cheat by consulting
| others immediately after a failed attempt without even trying the
| "deep dive" of carefully going through the reasoning.
|
| > _During a decade of education, we physicists learn more than
| the tools of the trade; we also learn the walk and talk of the
| community, shared through countless seminars and conferences,
| meetings, lectures and papers. After exchanging a few sentences,
| we can tell if you're one of us. You can't fake our community
| slang any more than you can fake a local accent in a foreign
| country. My clients know so little about current research in
| physics, they aren't even aware they're in a foreign country._
|
| This also reminds me of the life of Alexander Grothendieck who
| after a decade of brilliant work ("Golden Age" in his 30's to
| 40's) in which he stayed in touch with the mathematical community
| through unsurmountable correspondence and singlehanendly spread a
| lot of remarkable seeds which later blossomed wonderfully in the
| field --- one day vehemently and visibly protested the military-
| industrial complex in France (because of his traumatic WWII
| experience), was left alone by his intimidated fellow academics
| (who were fearful to simply cut off a tremendous amount of
| funding resources) and then simply stopped engaging with the
| community all together and never in his later life found a way to
| come back in (despite his brilliant "track record") but instead
| grew more and more sour and frustrated becoming isolated, in the
| end even suffering from (mild) paranoid delusions while only a
| handful of people/acolytes kept him in touch with the outside
| world.
| rileyphone wrote:
| Re Grothendieck, I'd recommend the book When We Cease to
| Understand the World, which somewhat romantically tells his
| story alongside Schwarzschild, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg.
| It's put me in quite the spirit!
| iainctduncan wrote:
| This is really interesting, I'll be forwarding to my science
| writer friends for opinions.
|
| Potentially interesting to some: we get the same phenomenon right
| here on HN regularly! To someone an advanced understanding of
| music theory (including western harmony, tuning systems,
| acoustics, psychoacoustics, doing a graduate degree, etc) HN is a
| regular source of armchair music theorists putting forth their
| own musical grand unified theories of everything without
| understanding the foundations. I guess, much like the field the
| author works in, the nature of it is that a strong understanding
| of a small piece leads one to easily believe there is this neat
| and tidy system of well behaving patterns when the reality is
| vastly more complex. I'd say once a week or so I see posts on HN
| that are the musical equivalents. I used to answer with pointers
| to what one might want to learn or suggests books, but really, I
| have no idea what the right response to that sort of thing is.
| It's way, way more complicated than one would think coming from a
| tangentially related field. Perhaps similarly, the popular music
| theory writing out there creates the same effect.
| indymike wrote:
| > the nature of it is that a strong understanding of a small
| piece leads one to easily believe there is this neat and tidy
| system of well behaving patterns when the reality is vastly
| more complex.
|
| The complexity is what keeps this industry interesting. Those
| people who are getting those little flashes of clarity, only to
| be crushed at the wheel of complexity, well, I have to admit I
| was and sometimes still am one of them.
| paulpauper wrote:
| what is an example of this. I find the idea of armchair music
| experts to be amusing.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| hmm, hard to summon one, but mostly about stuff spanning
| probability/machine learning and tuning systems/harmony. Lots
| of very naive statistical inferences with conclusions that
| seem supported by the data - because they don't understand
| the data. Like "we found out X because of our analysis of the
| intervals/chords/whatever they are counting" in these pieces.
| Where the numerical prevalence really doesn't mean anything
| similar to what they are positing it means. Tuning and
| systems and harmony are a) freaking complicated b) almost
| neat, but so, so not neat on closer examination. :-)
| ThreePhotons wrote:
| Here's an example: https://dwheeler.com/essays/sight-
| reading.html
|
| It's funny (fascinating actually!) because it reads just like
| your typical highly opinionated software engineering blog
| post, only applied to music. Yet most of it, particularly the
| first three points, has no basis in reality. (E.g. point 3 -
| any music theorist will tell you there is a VERY valid reason
| for choosing a double-sharp over a natural in particular
| contexts.)
| smartscience wrote:
| If you want to go digging on Usenet, check out Albert
| Silvermann (I think it was) on rec.music.theory.
| alar44 wrote:
| There was an article the other day where someone was saying
| something like "people who listen to more dissonant music,
| like heavy metal, may not be as good at hearing nuances in
| less dissonant music like classical."
|
| That sentence right there is just jam packed with bullshit
| and misunderstanding.
| amtamt wrote:
| A person willing to spend time, trying to understand nature,
| rather than wasting countless hours on scrolling pages is very
| noble, even if one did not get or missed opportunity in earlier
| years of life.
|
| Who knows who ends up being a role model for a bright kid who
| otherwise would not have taken interest in physics, science or
| nature, and then goes on to become next Einstein or Tesla or
| Edison.
|
| Also, I am deeply impressed by the group who are continuing
| spread of knowledge, giving better direction to the fellow
| explores without judgement. I wish more professionals could spend
| an hour or two a week/ month in such a way.
| stretchwithme wrote:
| Sabine is on Youtube.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1yNl2E66ZzKApQdRuTQ4tw
| john-tells-all wrote:
| Her video essays are very entertaining and educational. She has
| a hilarious sense of humor :) Recommended!
| zone411 wrote:
| I stopped watching her channel after her video on the
| simulation theory. It was very poor.
| https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-s...
| ncmncm wrote:
| Every culture thinks the universe is whatever they just
| invented.
|
| Victorians imagined it was a clock. Now we imagine it's a
| video game.
|
| You can tell from that that it is vacuous.
| [deleted]
| csours wrote:
| Edit: disregard this comment, see reply for context
|
| I find it odd that this is not acknowledged or linked from the
| article. Perhaps this is a signal that Aeon is ashamed of
| YouTube or perhaps they do not want to share traffic to another
| platform??
| spxtr wrote:
| The article is from 2016, before she started her YouTube
| channel.
| Dig1t wrote:
| This was a super interesting article, it makes me sad though. As
| someone who loves studying physics for fun, it's disheartening to
| hear how hard it is to be really good at it and how people at the
| highest levels kind of look down on all the people who are not
| researchers in the field. I mean, I get it, it's a very difficult
| field and it requires an incredible rigor to contribute to it. It
| gives me a kind of "what's the point?" feeling though. The best I
| can ever be is a crackpot.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Academics should see themselves as public servants, not a
| priest class.
| bigcat123 wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28019659 - July 2021 (2
| comments)
|
| _The Problem with Crackpot Emails from Amateur Physicists
| (2016)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590983 - March
| 2021 (1 comment)
|
| _What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12268362 - Aug 2016 (318
| comments)
| tomcat27 wrote:
| I'm probably in the same boat as those people, but in AI. Some of
| the problems I find interesting are just out of my depth. I don't
| know exactly what's required and from where to catch up to
| attempt a particular question in mind.
|
| A PhD student's story on this.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/73n9pm/d_c...
| bmitc wrote:
| I think part of the problem is that science is not honest with
| itself. There is some sense that getting a Ph.D. is an
| institutionalization process, one that does not really reward
| non-conservative, long-term, or high probability of failure
| work. And god forbid if someone wants to revisit "known" ideas
| and results to help clarify them, apply them, or place them in
| better context. There is very much an "in" crowd in science,
| which leaves a lot of people, people who could positively
| contribute, feeling "out". We have commoditized academic
| research, at least in the science and engineering fields, which
| makes things very streamlined and on rails.
|
| I've spent some time in both academic and industrial circles of
| mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, and physicists.
| It is a bit astonishing just how people in each one of these
| groups all sound like each other and distinct from the other
| groups. There are particular mannerisms and even idiomatic
| phrases that each group uses. Some simple ones are that
| physicists like to say "it goes like" and use the word "codes"
| to refer to code, as in software code. Computer scientists like
| to say "it better be". There are many others that I've lost
| track of and should have written down over these years. Yes, in
| many ways, the little idiomatic phrases make sense, but it at
| least lends credence to the question that if they all use the
| same phrases, something very simple and harmless, how else are
| they "conditioned"?
|
| The book _Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried
| Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their
| Lives_ by Jeff Schmidt covers some of this.
|
| It all makes me wonder if someone like John Archibald Wheeler,
| a personal favorite, could be successful in today's academic
| climate.
| nautilius wrote:
| The simple answer is: funding. There is no (public) money to
| _revisit "known" ideas and results to help clarify them,
| apply them, or place them in better context._ And I would not
| be the one to explain to the public to spend their money on
| known ideas rather than discover something new and shiny.
|
| Concerning a PhD, I think it's pretty easy to see that that's
| not the stage in your career where you would want to embark
| on long-term, high risk research.
|
| Also, I am not surprised that people doing a similar job have
| a common vocabulary and vernacular. You could say culture.
| I'd be surprised if carpenters, mechanics, et al. don't have
| the same thing, with other words and topics, of course.
|
| No conspiracies needed.
|
| Wheeler had significant contributions, had the right
| pedigree, the right schools. I don't see how he would be at a
| disadvantage today.
| Fomite wrote:
| "The simple answer is: funding. There is no (public) money
| to revisit "known" ideas and results to help clarify them,
| apply them, or place them in better context. And I would
| not be the one to explain to the public to spend their
| money on known ideas rather than discover something new and
| shiny."
|
| Which is a pity. There's a prominent member of my field who
| does this for causal inference work, and it has been
| invaluable.
| tomcat27 wrote:
| The problem at heart is research pace. Slowing the pace
| should help. i.e., it should be ok for faculty to produce
| half the papers they now produce and still retain their
| hopes on tenure, or whatever grants and glory.
|
| I cannot get creative under pressure. I don't know how
| anyone can.
|
| There is insurmountable amount of papers produced every
| year in AI, and everyone's in a rat race for some reason
| I don't understand. There is no way someone can exist in
| a department for more than a year without pushing a
| paper.
|
| At least in AI, the courses students are taught,
| professors have an understanding are out of touch with
| the kind of mathematical rigor needed.
| cupofpython wrote:
| >And I would not be the one to explain to the public to
| spend their money on known ideas rather than discover
| something new and shiny.
|
| Speaking of relating scientists to labor workers..
|
| There is a lot of value to be earned by closing the gap
| between cutting edge, but proven, science and easily
| understood training documents for contract workers.
|
| I would say most people would not care if we stopped using
| tax dollars to fund string theory research or finding
| 'habitable' planets, and a host of other luxury topics. we
| need to fortify our infrastructure (in every sense of the
| word) with all the things we have established as 'known
| ideas' today. it doesnt feel like we are in the golden age
| anymore where we can afford luxury research. at least not
| this decade.
|
| imo The only 3 research fields still worth investing tax
| dollars in is long term energy storage, AI, and GMO.
| Everything else can kick rocks and start pitching in with
| more necessary labor or do it on their own time. the reason
| for those exceptions is that _based on what we already
| know_ , there is a potential for resolving some unknowns
| that would result in global disruptions. IE self driving
| cars have proof of concept, resetting cell age has been
| done in mice,and the energy crisis demands a need for
| energy storage research to be exhausted
|
| This standpoint is very specific to the world we live in
| today. Such luxury research is the reason we are where we
| are today and we should continue it in the future, but
| given what we know now - we should be in a heavy transition
| period towards getting the most out of what we already
| know. We've reached the part of the brainstorm session
| where the new topics being introduced arent exactly wrong,
| but it is borderline annoying and distracting in relation
| to accomplishing anything and it would be nice if our
| smartest people would contribute to the project
| louloulou wrote:
| > we should be in a heavy transition period towards
| getting the most out of what we already know
|
| That's what a free market is for. Developing technology
| from what we already know is _profitable_ and self
| sustaining. I can 't think of anything worse than
| governments directing technology development.
|
| Science is the process of uncovering and understanding
| things about the world that we don't already know. Who
| exactly is in a position to know what counts as luxury?
| By your logic the discovery of the electron 125 years ago
| was luxury research, and the fact that our civilization
| is based on electricity and electronics today is
| irrelevant. General relativity didn't have practical
| applications for almost a hundred years, now we all rely
| on it indirectly everyday for GPS.
| bmitc wrote:
| It's not about conspiracy theories. It's about reality. You
| even explicitly called it out: culture. That's just the way
| humans work, for better or worse. One of my points, and I
| think a point of _Disciplined Minds_ , is that scientists
| are sometimes not honest or self-aware of the culture that
| they're a part of. Science is not a purely rational
| endeavor. There's some fashion and belief to it.
|
| > Wheeler had significant contributions, had the right
| pedigree, the right schools. I don't see how he would be at
| a disadvantage today.
|
| I didn't mean it as a critique upon Wheeler's potential. He
| was incredible. But he switched fields and research
| directions several times during his long and successful
| career. I'm not sure academics today have that fluidity in
| their careers (not due to internal forces but rather the
| external ones).
| nautilius wrote:
| I don't see why scientists would be less self-aware of
| their culture than other groups. In particular, that
| culture has got nothing to do with the things you decry
| (why is no one looking at old ideas, where, again, the
| simple problem is money).
|
| As soon as Wheeler would have tenure today, he could
| switch all day long. I am not talking about Wheeler's
| potential either, but whether he ticks the boxes to make
| him likely to succeed today. And he does.
|
| You are looking for a career that wouldn't work today?
| Freeman Dyson. Getting tenure at Princeton aged 29
| _without a doctorate_ , not so likely today.
| bmitc wrote:
| > I don't see why scientists would be less self-aware of
| their culture than other groups.
|
| In my opinion, there's a rationality bias. In that, if
| one thinks that they are operating rationally, then they
| think they are somewhat immune to cultural biases and
| inclinations. If I am not mistaken, this is similar to
| things Paul Feyerabend discussed. This is also heavily
| discussed in the book _Disciplined Minds_ I linked above.
|
| > You are looking for a career that wouldn't work today?
| Freeman Dyson. Getting tenure at Princeton aged 29
| without a doctorate, not so likely today.
|
| I absolutely agree. I think it's beyond not likely. It is
| basically an impossibility.
| cinntaile wrote:
| The references should allow you to follow some sort of red
| thread. They will probably aid in closing the knowledge gap as
| well. It's probably like in this article (it was a good article
| btw) though, you need more maths. Either you use university
| curricula to find out what maths you need as a starting point
| or you focus on the maths that pops up in the papers and work
| your way from there.
| tomcat27 wrote:
| I can't speak for others, but I find scientific literature is
| not written general audience to understand, for a variety of
| reasons such as (a) publisher limitation on number of pages
| (b) to communicate core message right without distraction (c)
| to not bore a certain people etc.
|
| Not to mention, depending on the sub-fields, at least in AI,
| there is quite a bit of noise in papers as they are
| explaining _their_ viewpoint which might differ from broad
| consensus or disproven in future.
|
| I find papers are typically written keeping in mind a
| specific set of people, who are typically in that particular
| sub-field for some time. In sub-fields like quantum
| computation, that specific set of people authors have in mind
| while writing paper are <100, and those are not newbies.
|
| Newbies can quickly get discouraged reading a paper out of
| the blue. Picking the right papers at the beginning requires
| exposure to the field.
|
| It's not simple.
|
| I really hope what you said is practical. I tried. Hope it's
| my fault because the alternative option doesn't exist for me.
| abeppu wrote:
| But ... I think with AI, if you have an insight that isn't
| motivated by math per se, but is motivated by some other
| problem intuition, you can still attempt to implement it, and
| the proof is sort of in the pudding.
|
| With physics, even the experts can go on developing theory
| which (as I understand it) arguably might never be testable, or
| is only testable after some absurdly expensive new machine is
| planned and built which might take decades. So an armchair
| physicist with an idea can have no route to falsifying their
| idea.
| tomcat27 wrote:
| sounds like a good plan to get tenure. lol
| car_analogy wrote:
| > I'm probably in the same boat as those people, but in AI.
| Some of the problems I find interesting are just out of my
| depth.
|
| You are not. There's an ocean of difference between someone
| that recognizes their ignorance, and someone that doesn't.
| c22 wrote:
| Surely if someone is paying a consultant to weigh in on their
| ideas they must have some inkling that they're out of their
| element.
|
| From the article:
|
| > _One or two seemed miffed that I didn't immediately
| exclaim: 'Genius!', but most of my callers realised that they
| can't contribute to a field without meeting today's quality
| standard. Then again, I hear only from those willing to
| invest in advancing their education to begin with._
| cft wrote:
| "All of them are men."
|
| I have a PhD in physics and one of Nobel prize laureates in
| theoretical physics made the following observation in my presence
| (I will leave him anonymous for obvious reasons): "All crackpots
| with zero knowledge of physics that have ever emailed me are men.
| It shows that there's more to the STEM gender gap than
| discrimination".
| gifnamething wrote:
| That's entirely compatible with the concept of girls being
| pushed away from STEM via social pressure
| phkahler wrote:
| Only problem I saw in there was this:
|
| >> Sociologists have long tried and failed to draw a line between
| science and pseudoscience. In physics, though, that 'demarcation
| problem' is a non-problem, solved by the pragmatic observation
| that we can reliably tell an outsider when we see one.
|
| My issue isn't with the apparent arrogance of the in-club. It's
| with the certainty she expresses that there isn't any
| pseudoscience going on _inside_ that club.
| SilasX wrote:
| > And I put up a note on my blog offering physics consultation,
| including help with theory development: 'Talk to a physicist.
| Call me on Skype. $50 per 20 minutes.'
|
| Interesting! A lot of times, this is what I want (as the asker)
| -- to be able to do quick back-and-forth with someone genuinely
| knowledgeable to identify where my understanding is right and
| wrong, and where I need to look next. I'd be interested if there
| were a general platform where you can hire experts on these
| terms. (Not interested in physics though.)
| cobertos wrote:
| I would love a platform like this as well. About 1 hour into an
| intensive search, I find that I have so many questions that are
| hard to Google that an expert would easily be able to walk me
| through. $50 for 20 minutes would be an incredible boon in
| those situations.
| ipnon wrote:
| Turns out physics is actually really easy once you get rid of all
| the pesky mathematics!
| archontes wrote:
| This is what I kept trying to explain to the freshmen and
| sophomores I used to tutor. The physics is easy once you learn
| the conservations: energy flows and transforms, can you see
| where it goes and add it up?
|
| The math is hard.
|
| Same deal in calculus. Conceptually very easy, you can
| determine the total by adding up the amount in the slices.
| Calculus is easy, algebra is hard.
|
| For anyone out there beginning their journey reading this,
| there is nothing I would recommend more than this: do the work;
| chew the pencil; become very good at algebra.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The challenge of physics is that the relationship between
| concept and math reverses as the further you go.
|
| Early on, studying Newtons laws, the concepts are way easier
| than the math for most people. Inertia, parabolas, friction,
| angles.. we can see it and use it every day.
|
| But the current state of knowledge is that we can reliably
| use math to calculate phenomena that seem to have no analog
| in the familiar concepts that govern our everyday experience.
| The math of dark matter is fairly straightforward but the
| concept is so weird that tons of people reject it out of hand
| (as seen in the comments whenever it comes up on HN).
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I once derived the equation in the Mark's handbook for sizing
| a drive shaft from first principles for a project, not
| knowing I could have just looked it up. I can't even imagine
| being able to do it now. This is what I miss, 30 years post
| B.S.M.E. as a programmer. I can't do the math any more,
| because I can't remember the algebra.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| It's been 7 years for me and I'm certain I would fail a
| test in anything past Calc 1 now. I can still remember
| derivatives, limits, and basic integrals but anything past
| that would be a wash without going over a textbook first.
|
| Ironically I actually did really well in multivariable
| calculus in college. I had tremendous trouble focusing on
| anything I didn't find interesting, but once I recognized
| that all the computer graphics papers I was reading at the
| time were all based in multivariable calculus and
| differential equations I was hooked.
| Qem wrote:
| I share this experience. It seems advanced math skills
| are hard to "mothball" properly. Either you keep using
| them day-to-day, or you'll will lose them real fast.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Physics is actually still pretty hard without the maths: if
| you imagine you have a new phenomena (e.g. a whole bunch of
| seemingly bizarre "elementary" particles a la hadrons before
| quarks) characterising them in a way that they can be
| modelled let alone modelling them is very hard.
| archontes wrote:
| I agree, but I think we're talking about slightly different
| things. I was more referring to the judicious division and
| encapsulation of concepts that we already understand very
| well.
|
| More science education than science the philosophical
| pursuit. Which was more the concern of the folks I was
| tutoring.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| And then at the other end of the spectrum, these same types of
| people decide to go into other fields and end up doing
| spectacularly well:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
| larodi wrote:
| Now translate this to people in IT who never went to university
| and try to write the next Facebook...
| ben_w wrote:
| Nice to see. I know myself well enough to know that, despite
| working my way through the physics modules of brilliant.org [0],
| despite the A-levels in maths and further maths, despite watching
| and listening to a lot of popsci, I fail any professional
| scientist's shibboleth tests.
|
| [0] actually all of brilliant.org, but the rest of the learning
| paths aren't important to this context
| cosmojg wrote:
| Which shibboleth tests would you fail?
| ben_w wrote:
| The ones that would allow me to ask questions and get
| responses like I'm a fresher at university rather than like I
| mistook Star Trek for a documentary.
|
| I absolutely understand not having time for the later -- I
| don't have time for politicians and pundits who mistake
| fiction for fact in computer science -- but it does mean I
| can't use Physics Stack Exchange to learn stuff by asking
| questions because my questions are, essentially, too dumb.
| joshu wrote:
| I would love to have access to this in general (but maybe not for
| a physicist specifically) - sometimes I just am having trouble
| understanding a paper and want someone to walk me through it.
| Hire a biologist / computer scientist / etc
| JabavuAdams wrote:
| Yeah, me too. I guess investors get this, although there's
| usually spin.
| mcguire wrote:
| As a computer scientist, I've only encountered this once. My grad
| school advisor pointed the guy to me, who insisted on having
| phone conversations. He was interested in compiler technology; I
| suggested the Dragon Book, EOPL, and a few other of the usual
| suspects. He said, "Oh, that's all academic nonsense."
|
| I don't think I ever properly thanked Mohammed for that...
| paultopia wrote:
| What a cool project! As a law professor, I get a bunch of crank
| letters all the time too, but it's typically from people who want
| legal representation to defend themselves against an imagined
| conspiracy (often involving the CIA, China/Russia/etc., any of
| the usual paranoia-suspect churches, etc.). Sadly, setting up a
| "pay me to talk about it" service would in that case would really
| not help matters.
| alerax wrote:
| I'm curious why the author's clients tend to fit my demographic:
| "Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a
| background in engineering or a related industry. All of them are
| men."
|
| I'm a male engineer in my 40s, and I've recently developed an
| interest in trying to understand quantum mechanics. I wonder if
| people like me, seeing the arc of our lives curving closer to its
| end, develop a natural curiosity about How It All Works/What It
| All Means.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Many things can emerge at different times.
|
| > Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a
| background in engineering or a related industry
|
| I have heard there is such a thing referred to as "the
| retiree's patent" -- presumably not fantastically market-
| worthy, but motivated in part by desire to make a difference or
| leave a mark.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Reminds me of one of my lecturers saying he stopped responding,
| after a few years of teaching, to people who had built a
| perpetual motion machine.
|
| Also makes me glad I moved into IT, though the bug never leaves
| you, for anyone in a similar position this is a wonderful book on
| general rel, and requires very little maths - "Visual
| Differential Geometry and Forms: A Mathematical Drama in Five
| Acts"
| lucidbee wrote:
| I have to admit I occasionally have crackpot physics ideas
| floating around in my head and I actually have seen that Dr
| Hossenfelder has this service and thought of contacting her. But
| my tech job took too much time to even clarify my thoughts. (I
| had probably 5 undergrad physics/astronomy courses.) How many of
| us have these thoughts I wonder? It's a fun way to pass the time.
| Recently I thought that rather than thinking of these ideas as
| physics I should look at them as science fiction and write an
| amusing story.
| JabavuAdams wrote:
| Same here. The crackpot side of me is trying to create
| intelligent tools to augment my own intelligence, so that I can
| get smart/fast/wise enough to understand / predict / control
| enough biology so I don't die of something boring before having
| a good long time to figure out how to get to a Neutron star or
| something. Beginning to realize that biology is more
| complicated than physics (the models, not the scope).
| bmitc wrote:
| > Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are
| using metaphors.
|
| I think she should replace "science writers" with physicists. In
| my experience, it's when physicists give overflowing and
| superfluous explanations of things that cause the most trouble,
| because they are viewed as authorities. Neil deGrasse Tyson,
| Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, PBS Space Time, and many others. It's
| interesting, because I once read an interview with Brian Green,
| and the question was: what career would you have chosen if you
| weren't a physicist? His answer was both surprising and
| unsurprising: a Baptist preacher. One should note that he
| actually has the speaking style of one.
|
| It brings up an interesting point in that physics at the highest
| level sounds _almost_ like what ill-informed amateurs produce. I
| have degrees in mathematics and some understanding of physics,
| but I 've watched a few lectures of Ed Witten before, and he
| might as well be just making it all up. I know, it can all be
| backed out such that it all follows from known mathematics and
| physics, but one does have to marvel at the similarity, and I
| think this is what so-called cranks get emboldened by. It makes
| it worse when physicists use words like "believe".
|
| I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they
| do is model building. The models are not reality. What reality is
| currently lies in the realm of philosophy. The models physicists
| build are simply our best descriptions based on what we observe
| (string theory aside). The article gets at this a bit with
| mentioning metaphors, but it still doesn't drive home the point
| because she's referring to metaphors of metaphors (i.e.,
| metaphors for the physical models). Once you understanding that
| physics is about building models that describes what we observe
| in physical reality, it lowers the barrier of "authority". In
| that, in some sense, the entire point of physics is often to find
| out how we're wrong just as much as it is to clarify where we're
| right. I think many don't understand that when "is" is used in
| physics, it really means "is modeled by" (or something to that
| effect).
|
| I'm reminded of this scene from one of my favorite movies, _A
| Serious Man_ : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbzWYjVrvpI
| alecst wrote:
| In undergrad physics we had a saying: "the only thing we know
| for sure is that all of our equations are wrong."
| gowld wrote:
| Briane Greene is very knowledgeable about physics, and
| brilliant at math, but his main life's work isn't as
| _physicist_. His work is embedding physics in mathematical
| models in a way that is does not generate empirically testable
| predictions. His string theory work has the same amount of
| support as real-Universe physics as does a Baptist preacher 's
| sermons.
| wallfacer120 wrote:
| For those popular science communicators that you mentioned, do
| you feel that they are misinforming their audience by
| oversimplifying? Or by leaving them with genuinely wrong ideas?
| gowld wrote:
| For people who can study physics (such as students) it's
| confusing and misleading, and harms their efforts to
| understand the real material. (Source: studied physics in
| college, and had a hard time dislodging the nonsense
| metaphors about things like "virtual particles".)
|
| For people who can, it's just fairy tales, so what's the
| point of instilling a false sense of understanding?
|
| Physics is mathematical models + experimental data. Good
| physical intiution comes from familiarity bred of working
| through math problems and observing experiments. Bad
| intuition comes from metaphors.
| andi999 wrote:
| The 'virtual particle' non-sense (or very limited sense as
| artefacts of pertubation theory) goes very deep. Ask and 9
| out of 10 physicists will tell you there are such thing
| (otherwise how do you explain Casimir effect), even at a
| reputable high energy lab the 'reason' for the range of
| interaction was given by Heisenbergs uncertainty applied to
| the creation of (massive) interactive virtual particles.
|
| If it is interesting: from 10:00 onwards discussion about
| the reality of individual terms of the pertubation series:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72us6pnbEvE&t=1367s
| robocat wrote:
| > I'm reminded of this scene from one of my favorite movies, A
| Serious Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbzWYjVrvpI
|
| That is beautifully appropriate to the article -- thank you.
| bmitc wrote:
| If you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend it. It's a
| bit of a sleeper hit I think, even for Coen brothers fans.
| It's really quite perfect and nails all the colloquialisms it
| gets at, which are a plenty. I rewatch it every now and then
| and just laugh my ass off.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| " _I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what
| they do is model building. The models are not reality."_
|
| I'm not a physicist although I've had training in the subject
| and I'm inclined to agree with you. It seems to me there are at
| least three issues here; the first is many physicists just
| aren't good at drawing analogies or describing what they're
| trying to explain; few, say, have Feynman's talent. The second
| is they aren't good at pitching their explanation at the right
| level (to the recipient's level of knowledge)--they don't judge
| the recipient's level of knowledge well before they answer. And
| third is that they've a level of impatience when it comes to
| such explanations--that is they're out of their comfort zone in
| that they cannot use their usual jargon as they would do with
| other physicists who talk at their level. (I've seen comments
| to the effect that _' that cannot be explained, you just have
| to believe the math'_ -- then they don't bother to actually
| provide the equation or its reference because it's a text-based
| web page (not that dissimilar to the explanation of the eqn in
| the video.)
|
| However, it's not fair to single out physicists alone, this
| problem often occurs when there's a disparity of understanding
| between professionals and others.
|
| For example, I've experienced the problem here on HN in both
| directions (that is when I'm replying to a post where I have
| greater knowledge than the recipient and vice versa). Let's say
| we have a physics topic that's somewhat tricky to explain such
| as the Aharonov-Bohm effect and I ask a professional physicist
| who works in the area a general question that to me may be a
| complex matter but which is a trite one for him/her then the
| moment he/she gets a whiff of understanding that I'm not at
| his/her level of understanding--or that I'm not using the
| proper vernacular then one either doesn't get a reply or
| alternatively only a short nonchalant one that doesn't answer
| my question. This isn't always the case but it often is--in my
| example the reply may be along the lines _' you'd better get a
| better understanding of potentials before you tackle that
| problem.'_
|
| In the reverse situation when I'm providing an explanation then
| I'll often go to considerable lengths to provide a simple
| explanation but this is not easy as it takes considerable time
| (especially so if the reply is comparatively short, succinct
| AND easy to understand). I don't often succeed and as a result
| my comments are often too long, tedious and boring thus few
| people bother to read them. Essentially, one needs to learn how
| to best answer questions where there's no really good, simple
| or obvious analogy and I, like many others, don't claim great
| expertise in doing so.
|
| This poor communication amongst technical processionals is a
| serious problem. One only has to take a glance at the
| scientific and technical literature to see the problem.
| Frankly, I've often seen papers on topics that I'm competent in
| that I struggle to read as the language is so strained and
| obtuse, it's as if the writers are deliberately going out of
| their way to sound erudite--but in reality what they've written
| is essentially gobbledygook until the paper has been read and
| reread multiple times over. This should not be necessary.
|
| Moreover, the same problem arises when it comes to math
| equations. Often there's an assumption that readers are fully
| cognizant with the mathematical treatment of the subject and
| thus writers often leave out intermediate stages that would
| make the understanding easier or they don't provide proper
| explanations and or legends where the symbols are adequately
| defined, and so on. Again, this smacks of trying to prove how
| smart they are, but in the end it doesn't do justice to their
| cause.
|
| It seems to me the only way around this problem is to include
| some _communications_ training in their courses. Incidentally,
| I don't think the 'math problem' is quite as bad as
| Hossenfelder makes out (although it is a problem). Most people
| who are going to ask physicists questions on advanced topics
| actually do have a reasonable amount of math training behind
| them, so physicists need to keep the math simple as is possible
| and spend a little time leading questioners through the tricky
| bits.
|
| On the whole I think Sabine Hossenfelder does a truly excellent
| job at explaining physics (from my experience of watching her
| on YouTube), especially so given that she's doing so in her
| second language English (if my German were as good as her
| excellent English then I'd be very pleased). If I have any
| criticism of her talks then it's that she pitches her topics
| lower than I'd like, similarly she uses almost no math in her
| explanations (but then, I can't complain, she's primarily not
| aiming her talks at people like me).
| nautilius wrote:
| All of science is model building, or will advance to it (from
| counting leaves to biochemical models of photosynthesis). When
| we say we have an understanding of some phenomenon, it means
| that we have a model that correlates with observations
| (simplified).
|
| It's a failure of an education system that leaves its citizens
| with no conception of what science is, or how 'progress' is
| made.
|
| That's become very clear with regards to Dr. Fauci and the CDC.
| They can explain all they want about the _current state of
| understanding_ (modeling) when they are called out by the
| public as charlatans when the insight and thus guidelines
| change.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Re: CDC guidance, we also have the basic cultural problem in
| the US that for a significant amount of the population, ever
| publicly changing your mind about any topic is seen as a sign
| of moral weakness, or even by default perceived as a lie.
| gwright wrote:
| > in the US that for a significant amount of the population
|
| Any reason to think this is a distinctly US phenomena as
| opposed to a more widespread phenomena?
| hpcjoe wrote:
| This 1000x.
|
| I am flabbergasted at the attacks on scientists explaining
| current understanding, until I realize that the people
| attacking very rarely comprehend the process. This isn't a
| slap at people attacking scientists, it's very much an
| indictment of our educational and scicomm system, that we say
| "here is a fully functional adult, who doesn't have the
| slightest clue as to how this stuff actually works, and we
| are totally fine with it." As well as experts saying "insert
| random domain specific jargon here" for said individuals to
| consume.
|
| I've (PhD in physics) taken long (6-8hour) car rides with my
| Sensei (2 years of college) to tournaments. On the way, we
| talk about science, and I put in consumable, non-jargon
| terms, things like the big bang, quantum physics, steller
| lifecycles, etc. I'm not an expert in some of these, and out
| of practice in others, but being able to explain to an
| intelligent and curious person is feature IMO for scientists.
|
| One should not be mysterious, or assume mantles of
| superiority. We all put pants on, one leg at a time. Being
| able to explain the joy of discovery in an approachable way
| is a skill. One I'd love to see in graduate schools.
|
| My own anecdote on the crackpot bits ... I'd started at SGI
| in 1995 ABD. I was writing, and it was going slowly. My
| manager knew I was a physics type, and he forwarded me an
| email he'd received from someone on a new theory of
| relativity.
|
| Don't ask me why someone would email SGI (a workstation
| company) about this. I don't know.
|
| He asked me to look it over. This is like 4 weeks into the
| job (my first full time professional job post grad school). I
| thought this was an assignment worth doing. So I reviewed
| their paper. I caught a bunch of sign and other related
| errors they made, and wrote up a summary. He asked me to
| interact with them. So I sent it back to the people.
|
| I got all sorts of weirdness coming back from them. It was a
| conspiracy to keep their breakthrough out of the public mind.
| "No", I said, "it was a set of mathematical errors." I
| pointed out that if they fixed them, they would get normal
| special relativity. They didn't want to. And complained to my
| manager.
|
| Thus my introduction to internet cranks.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I think a big problem is that phycisists in particular and
| scientists in general like to come up with colorful stories
| that go along with their work, that have little resemblance to
| their actual work. They end up telling stories that have
| nothing to do with the science they are supposedly talking
| about.
|
| For example, "quantum teleportation" has nothing to do with the
| common meaning of the word "teleportation", but boy do people
| love talking and writing about it. The popular articles that
| are written about them don't tell you anything about what they
| are actually doing, even if you actually know the theory behind
| it.
| gowld wrote:
| That's a strong accusation against the people who predicted
| and then found the God Particle.
| a-dub wrote:
| i suspect this is largely driven by pressures to publish in
| high profile journals, which can tend to take interest in
| flashy sounding introductions and conclusions.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Physicists probably do do a poor job, but the general public
| are literally incapable of understand at any level so I don't
| think they should lose too much sleep over it.
|
| The over use of anthropomorphization and metaphor is an issue
| but equally they're usually not completely made up.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I think she should replace "science writers" with
| physicists._
|
| The two are not mutually exclusive. What you're describing is
| physicists _being_ science writers (or talkers, if they are
| doing videos or PBS specials). And yes, they are just as sloppy
| when they do it as non-physicists.
|
| _> I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that
| what they do is model building. The models are not reality._
|
| I agree. I think this is one of the key sources of confusion
| for non-physicists trying to learn about physics.
| bmitc wrote:
| > The two are not mutually exclusive. What you're describing
| is physicists being science writers
|
| That is of course true, but I was trying to point out that
| it's a much more dangerous situation when writers,
| presenters, etc. are scientists themselves (whether active or
| perceived as active), because it allows people to say "well,
| that's how the experts talk". It's somewhat expected of
| popular science writers who are not active scientists to
| speak in a loose way. I do agree that popular science writers
| need to tighten up their publications, but scientists need to
| be especially careful when they write for the so-called
| laymen.
|
| I'll take this as a moment to again push my favorite science
| writing ever, and that's the Scientific American Library book
| series. It's some of the best written scientific literature
| for the interested amateur out there, that I know of, written
| by experts in the fields in very honest (to the source
| material) ways.
|
| https://www.thriftbooks.com/series/scientific-american-
| libra...
| paulpauper wrote:
| _I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what
| they do is model building. The models are not reality._
|
| They can be considered approximations of reality. To say they
| are not reality seems dismissive. Newtonian physics is as close
| to 'real' as anyone is going to find.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I think physicists are "careful enough" with their
| communications to the general public and amongst themselves. At
| the end of the day, they got work to do after all.
|
| The weird thing about physics is that it attracts a lot of
| strange fellows that want to grapple with these ideas much like
| the OP is working with. As far as I know, no other field
| attracts such folks, and no, people who cargo-cult Kubernetes
| into their small company workflow for resume bullet-points are
| NOT the same kind of person as someone who would waltz into a
| general relativity colloquium, from the street, sporting no
| degree whatsoever (it happens).
|
| There's whole categories of outsiders, some call them cranks,
| who get involved with physics. John Baez even has a purity test
| of sorts for this (the crackpot index):
| https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I agree, it is oddly unique to physics.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I think physicists are "careful enough"
|
| By what standard? The general public doesn't understand
| physics and makes little use of it.
|
| > The weird thing about physics is that it attracts a lot of
| strange fellows that want to grapple with these ideas much
| like the OP is working with.
|
| Isn't that what attracts all physicists, and humanity in its
| quest to understand its world?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Well, to be fair, current theory for vacuum energy is 120 orders
| of magnitude off from observed values from what I've read
| (IANAPhysicist). That's a lot of runway for crackpot physics.
| Animats wrote:
| I've encountered people with a cult interest in quaternions. To
| anyone who does 3D graphics, they're just a convenience. But they
| can be visualized as a point on the surface of a 4D hypersphere,
| and there are generalizations to higher dimensions and to
| representations where you can express "rotate 720 degrees". For
| some, that way lies madness.
| ncmncm wrote:
| When you find a quaternion cultist, turn them onto octonions.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| When she writes about needing a lot of mathematics, what
| specifically does she mean and how many thousands of hours of
| problem solving and proof writing practice are we talking about
| for a person of average aptitude?
| relaytheurgency wrote:
| I can't speak to a doctoral level of knowledge, it's probably
| not really formalized and will differ on your specialization.
| But just for my bachelor's degree I took the following courses:
| Calculus 1, Calculus 2, Vector Calculus, Elementary Linear
| Algebra, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra.
|
| Those are just the courses specifically in the mathematics
| department. You also cover mathematics within the physics
| courses themselves of course. Especially in quantum mechanics
| and E&M. You also might be required to take more math depending
| on the structure of your degree program, I did a focus in
| chemistry as well so took more chemistry and less math than
| other students.
|
| I also can't say how many hours I spent on this. But the
| overwhelming amount of my homework time, every night, was spent
| writing proofs and solving mathematical equations. To a lay
| person physics work probably looks no different than
| mathematics. It was all math all the time :) Sometimes I would
| have a homework assignment that was only a few "problems" that
| would take me a dozen hours to solve. As for aptitude, I was
| probably in the middle amongst other physics students, but that
| group overall was above average already.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Thank you!
| Animats wrote:
| _" As long as you have funding, quantum gravity is basic research
| at its finest. If not, it's pretty much useless knowledge."_
|
| Hm. That bears thinking about.
|
| _pseudomathematical priestly class_
|
| Would that be string theory, which doesn't seem to lead to any
| falsifiable experiments? Smolin is very critical of string theory
| for that reason. It's apparently mathematically plausible but
| doesn't seem to lead anywhere.
|
| " _Science is prediction, not explanation "_ - Fred Hoyle
| tzs wrote:
| Black holes would be different if string theory is right. There
| would be no singularity, for instance, and no interior. String
| theory black holes (which are called fuzzballs) would emit
| slightly different gravitational waves when they merge. We
| should have sensitive enough gravitation wave detecters in the
| not too distant future to check this.
|
| There was a PBS Space Time episode on fuzzballs last November
| [1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=351JCOvKcYw
| anon_123g987 wrote:
| > _" Science is prediction, not explanation."_ - Fred Hoyle
|
| I don't know about string theory, but this is totally wrong.
| Exploiting a simple correlation gives you the ability to
| predict to a certain extent, but that's not science, that's
| numerology. I couldn't find the source of the quote, but I
| looked up the guy and found what I expected. From
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Other_controversies:
|
| _Hoyle also supported the following controversial hypotheses
| and speculations:
|
| The correlation of flu epidemics with the sunspot cycle, with
| epidemics occurring at the minimum of the cycle. The idea was
| that flu contagion was scattered in the interstellar medium and
| reached Earth only when the solar wind had minimum power.
|
| [...] _
| Fomite wrote:
| The best predictive model I've ever made tied rotavirus
| seasonality to prom dress sales.
|
| Science is explanation, which suggests testable predictions.
| thechao wrote:
| Hoyle wrote an entire -- very entertaining -- book at as
| indictment of the Big Bang hypothesis, which he didn't like.
| It's called "The Black Cloud".
| mcguire wrote:
| That's kind of an odd statement for an astronomer.
| ganzuul wrote:
| I feel that when the words 'shut up and calculate' were
| uttered, physics flew off into la-la land, and that without a
| backing of natural philosophy science became an engineering
| discipline at best and a cargo cult at worst. - It is a non
| sequitur to go from lack of understanding to saying there is
| nothing to understand. It would have been more honest to
| declare that Newton was correct in studying the occult, and
| that truth is yet to be revealed to our humbled minds.
|
| So, "priests" because they don't know about the spirit of
| inquiry that gave rise to natural philosophy; this sublime
| tradition that they have misunderstood.
| leephillips wrote:
| "Shut up and calculate" is to physics what "premature
| optimization" and "security through obscurity" are to
| computer science. Meaning that the people who know the actual
| contexts in which these phrases arose are simply weary of
| explaining their meanings to people who imagine that they
| understand them, and have long since given up.
| msdrigg wrote:
| A few years ago I was getting a undergraduate degree in physics
| and I was dating a girl who had a theory of gravity. I don't
| totally remember the theory now and I never fully understood it
| at the time, even though she tried to explain it to me. The few
| times we talked about it, I tried to argue against her theory
| rather than just listening.
|
| This article reminded me of that experience--especially the
| description of vague images. I think I could have used some
| advice from this guy, or at least some empathy.
| mikewarot wrote:
| What an awesome idea, talk to an expert in X for 20 minutes for a
| reasonable amount of money.
|
| I'd like to talk to someone to designs integrated circuits.
| g8oz wrote:
| The article comments on the site are thick with the autodidacts
| with an intuition that the author describes. They all seem to
| have missed a primary point made in the essay - if you can't
| describe it with math you have nothing.
| paulpauper wrote:
| on the other hand, the curvature of space can be described
| visually (famous gravity well example)
| solveit wrote:
| If that were the only way to describe the curvature of space
| then it would indeed be useless.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| I have never found it comfortable to imagine gravity as a
| rubber sheet with a weight on it, where Earth's gravity is
| making the 'model' work by pulling the weight and stretching
| the sheet. Trying to turn that into a 3D Sun with a planet
| orbiting it when there is no 'down' separate to the system,
| trying to imagine gravitational lensing when there is no way
| to imagine a NASCAR style banked corner in a stretched void,
| trying to imagine why a black hole can be so dense that light
| cannot get away.
|
| Imagine a rubber sheet and light as a toy car climbing up the
| well, it's easy to imagine the well becoming so steep that
| the car wheels cannot grip it, or the car motor cannot lift
| the weight of the car. Try imagining light heading directly
| 'out' from a black hole, space is compressed so much that ...
| what? Light loses its grip on spacetime? Spacetime is not
| just stretched but is being pulled inwards like a conveyor
| belt at 3e8 meters/second so light is at an effective
| standstill? (yet all frames of reference see light moving
| away from them at the speed of light).
|
| It doesn't fit a rubber sheet for anything, really, even the
| basic planet orbiting the gravity well has no easy imagining
| in 3D. It's somehow ... Earth taking the path of least
| action? a straight line in curved spacetime?
| ncmncm wrote:
| It was never a productive metaphor, in any way, but it let
| people with no mathematics feel like they had a sense of
| things. If you want to reason correctly, it is a trap.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I wonder if the author could understand why no one on this board
| has done the same thing for people who have an idea for "an app,"
| and, hey, they just need you to "program" it all for a 10% cut.
| krisoft wrote:
| This reminds me a story about my mom. She was a beautiful person,
| gave me and my brother all she could. She also believed in all
| kind of pseudo-science. Talking with her I think I gained a
| deeper understanding of why pseudo scientific things were
| alluring to her.
|
| I remember one day as I was visiting her. She brightened up, like
| someone who just remembered that they know a cool new story, and
| told me that scientist has discovered that some people have their
| sixth (or sevent?) chakra open! I could not act enthusiastically
| over this. Tried to explain to her politely that based on what I
| know about the world that does not sound like the kind of thing a
| real scientist would or could do. She accused me of having a
| closed mind, and we left the topic. Better be on friendly terms
| than having a disagreement ruin the mood.
|
| A few months later I was visiting with my then girlfriend. She
| was a medical student and my mom politely inquired what kind of
| doctor she wanted to be. The girlfriend told her that she is
| interested in specialising in endocrinology. My mom got really
| upset that we were using complicated words instead of talking
| plainly. We realised that she might not know the term, so we
| explained that an endocrinologist measures hormone levels,
| diagnoses and cures disorders of the hormone system, etc. Once
| explained thus, she declared that she never would have thought
| that hormones can be measured.
|
| That was a really surprising to me, because I have clear memories
| of my mom having an operative understanding about hormones. My
| grandad had diabetes, and she helped him with stuff related to
| that. One of her friends had some hormonal disorder and she
| referred to it as such.
|
| What i realised, that i understood hormones on a deeper level
| than her. Not the way a doctor would, but like I did know that
| they are molecules which signal cells in our bodies to do or not
| do specific things. I understood that molecules are just atoms
| clumped together. And I understood that atoms are just the lego
| bricks everything around us is built out of. I don't know how
| exactly one would measure the level of some hormone in ones
| blood, but I did understand that they are just chemicals, so
| through complicated analytical means they can be measured.
|
| And then I realised that if someone doesn't know these things
| about hormones, then when she reads a pop-science article talking
| about this or that hormone, then reads a different article
| talking about chakras they both sound the exact same kind of
| gobbledok. They sound both mystical and somehow connected to
| health. One might hear a story about how someone gained weight
| after their hormones went out of whack, or one might hear a story
| how someone cured their depression after they unblocked their
| heart chakra. If you don't know better, how would you know that
| one is bulsh*t and the other is a measurable, real thing.
|
| In fact here is the thing, the chakras are simpler, easier and
| nicer. You can see a nice drawing of them! They make sense.
| Hormones? I know a lot about chemistry, and more than what I
| would like to know about hormones secreted by the pancreas and
| even I can't keep all of them straight. There are many of them.
| They have complicated scientific names. They act in all kind of
| bizarro complicated ways. Too much is bad, too little is bad.
| Some are easier to measure analytically, some are harder. Chakras
| are so much simpler: they can be blocked or open, they have
| colours, they are associated with organs you have heard of.
| Simple! Also ... not real in the same sense hormones are.
|
| So I guess now I understand how it was hard for my mom to
| navigate the boundary of science and pseudo-science.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| If light is a wave, is it rude to not wave back?
| ganzuul wrote:
| Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal is a great resource if
| you are looking for a little more than pop-sci.
|
| I think the problem science communicators have is that the
| English speaking tradition divorced itself from natural
| philosophy so long ago that it seems intractable to build a
| bridge back to intuition and meaning from algebraic structures
| and faculty blessings. Fortunately luminaries such as for example
| Stephen Wolfram and Eric Weinstein are pulling ears, so the
| entrenched narrative of the nature of reality is no longer the
| exclusive purview of the pseudomathematical priestly class. :o)
|
| I warmly recommend listening to Curt's Salvatore Pais interview,
| as you will quickly dismiss certain doubts about the intent
| behind certain patents.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| One source of crackpots is people who encountered "postmodernist"
| ideas telling them that science is sexist/racist/whatever, and
| who then make the jump to thinking that anyone can contribute
| scientific theories without having to understand the canon,
| because the canon is part of the sexist/racist institution.
| javajosh wrote:
| Oddly, most programming seems to lack good models at intermediate
| levels of complexity. (In physics, those levels are called things
| like "chemistry" or "cellular biology"). Relational databases
| have a rigorous model; but what about OOP? What is it? It _feels_
| like some sort of weird, misbehaved algebra. I 've been doing it
| a long time, but properly characterizing it escapes me. I'd pay
| $50 if I thought someone had the answer, but I suspect they
| don't. (Or if they do, it's more of an opinion).
| overthemoon wrote:
| Wow, I love this. What a thoughtful, empathetic project. This
| passage really stuck out to me--
|
| "A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they
| project literal meanings onto words such as 'grains' of space-
| time or particles 'popping' in and out of existence. Science
| writers should be more careful to point out when we are using
| metaphors. My clients read way too much into pictures, measuring
| every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash.
| Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant
| information and what is artistic freedom. But the most important
| lesson I've learned is that journalists are so successful at
| making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come
| away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves.
| How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes if we never
| tell them?"
|
| Of course, this writing often isn't for the layperson, it's for
| an audience who can tell the difference between diagram, artistic
| license, and metaphor, but even so, it's good to think about,
| especially when communicating science to the general public.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I think this is a problem in a lot of areas where you invent
| new concepts for which we don't have words yet. Happens a lot
| in tech and also in science. If you use a metaphor that people
| can relate to there is a high chance they will latch on to the
| metaphor and push it into areas where it doesn't work anymore.
| I saw that a lot when "cloud computing" came up. I once
| described one of our systems as "basically a flash drive" which
| made sense in the context of the FDA regulation we were
| discussing but a few months later a director was outraged "but
| you said it's a flash drive" in a totally different context
| where the metaphor didn't make sense.
|
| Also saw it around COVID vaccines. I talked to several people
| who claimed calling it "vaccine" is fraudulent because in their
| minds a vaccine protects you 100% from the disease and if it
| only avoids hospitalization or severe cases it's not a vaccine.
| lumost wrote:
| This was such a common problem in my undergrad. I'd say over
| half of all incoming majors had at least some form of miss-
| understanding of what physics was and how it really worked
| coming off of pop sci. Even those who stick it out through Grad
| School and post docs often lament that they toiled away always
| believing that the grandiose visions of research presented in
| pop sci would eventually come true for them.
|
| While pop-sci has been radically successful at making physics
| concepts _appear_ accessible, it has woefully failed at making
| actual physics accessible. It 's no wonder that Americans
| increasingly view science as either the tony stark like
| practice of wizards - or as a ceremonious endeavor practiced by
| those whose beliefs are no more testable than a TV pundits.
|
| We need to do better at Science writing.
| nullc wrote:
| I bet the bad science writing sells much better-- readers
| enjoy the Feeling of Knowing. You're not going to get much of
| that feeling from an honest article on a complex subject.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| For me pop sci documentaries were quite a motivation to study
| Physics though. But yeah, after having studied it I have zero
| interest in pop sci anymore. It's unfortunately not really
| explaining things but more show casing things. But what I
| also learned while reading text books, listening and reading
| lectures: often the most concise explanations are very close
| to every day language. (In the lines of
| https://www.motionmountain.net/9lines.html which was recently
| also posted on HN) Would be great if such things could be
| included more into pop sci. Maybe in a way that at least the
| common notations are put in. That doesn't enable you to do
| meaningful calculations but at least it would be way closer
| to relevant literature. Unfortunately there's also quite a
| barrier to university literature in terms of pricing and some
| stuff is just not published on the Internet. E.g. lecture
| notes are only sporadically available but tend to be more
| readable than most books. FWIW Feynman's lectures on Physics
| really stand out here
| jacobr1 wrote:
| While there is always room for better, is this even a problem
| that is solvable?
|
| To a certain extent, fundamental background knowledge, in
| particular mathematical, is needed. So to present something
| to a general audience will necessarily involve a simplified
| model of some kind. This can be a bad analogy, but even a
| "good models" are flawed at the edges and seem likely to be
| the simpler the model becomes in relation to a more complex
| topic.
| JabavuAdams wrote:
| "If we just do better, they'll come around". Nah. Sometimes
| we're just starting too far apart, or frankly the person is
| not smart enough or has some mental difference that makes the
| requisite study too hard. We should try -- these are excuses
| that can be used to give up on people too soon, but ... you
| can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it think.
|
| The median person who can drive, pay taxes, be a loving
| partner, and parent is just ... disappointingly not smart if
| you've been surrounded by brainiacs for most of your life.
| Some very bright people have other personality quirks that
| make it hard for them to integrate new ideas outside their
| comfort zone.
|
| We need better people.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| You don't have to be particularly smart to do professional
| mathematics or physics. However, you do need to either come
| from money or be content with a monkish life. Both of those
| are "multiple post-docs" fields -- you're basically living
| hand-to-mouth until your mid 30s (which for most means not
| having kids).
|
| There are some folks who are incredibly motivated and also
| fundamentally incapable. But for most people, the biggest
| "issue" is that there are multiple lucrative and lower-
| stress exit ramps.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I also liked:
|
| "I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my
| 'crackpot consultant business', but I've stopped thinking of
| our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to
| understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are.
| They just weren't lucky enough to get the required education
| early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where
| to even begin."
|
| In some sense, labeling somebody a "crackpot" assigns a sort of
| malicious wrongness to them. It is interesting to see somebody
| who's dealt with a significant subset of these people and
| discovered more actual, honest misunderstanding than we (or at
| least I) would have expected.
| ganzuul wrote:
| The unfortunate truth is that humans derive status from
| belittling others. Being highly educated is apparently no
| defense against this common weakness.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I don't get a status boost from letting google label 80% of
| my incoming email as spam, but I am quite glad that it
| does.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > The unfortunate truth is that humans derive status from
| belittling others.
|
| It's not a truth any more than 'humans murder others when
| they're angry'. Sometimes humans belittle others and
| sometimes they gain status from it. Sometimes they lose
| status, and I suspect they almost always lose a little
| self-respect and feel more intensely the shame that was so
| strong, they just tried to project it onto someone else.
|
| > Being highly educated is apparently no defense against
| this common weakness.
|
| I think it depends on the fields of study. If you study
| humanity, you may understand this behavior. If you study
| quarks, I agree it is little defense.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's true, but also there exists a population that's
| unfortunately been misinformed by Quantum Pseudoscience
| Grifters. Physics (and medicine) seem to suffer
| particularly from this sort of thing. Enough misinformed
| people asking for real engagement will eventually wear even
| a patient person down (of course the ire should be more
| accurately targeted toward the grifters, not their
| victims).
|
| I mean -- as a programmer, my significant other thinks that
| my presence soothes the Machine Spirits and makes the
| computer magically cooperate. Imagine if this was a
| superstition! The random requests for IT support would be
| really annoying.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > ...misinformed by Quantum Pseudoscience Grifters.
| Physics (and medicine) seem to suffer particularly from
| this sort of thing.
|
| Quiet a few of the misinformed are HN commenters.
|
| Generally, the pattern appears to be "Foo is complex.
| Conspiracy theorist asserts there is a conspiracy making
| Foo complex. We cannot trust the mainstream experts
| because they are lying. Gishgallop with endless bad faith
| questions which take an enormous amount of time to answer
| properly but ultimately do not convince the question
| asker".
|
| The general takeaway, for me at least, is that even the
| most intelligent person can be sucked into crackpot
| conspiracy. The problem is "I'm an expert in this field,
| this means I'm smarter than most" and then thinking that
| intelligence in one area grants you insights into others.
|
| The worst part is conspiracies like to hide under the
| motto of "I'm just being a good skeptic". However, a good
| skeptic needs to actually dig deeper than just surface
| level assertions. A good skeptic needs to look into the
| counter claims to their conspiracy. What are the sources?
| Do the actually point to data or are they just naked
| assertions? Do the sources reference only other
| conspiracy websites? Do they have references? If this
| claim is actually true, why is it rejected by the
| mainstream? Who is actually benefiting from hiding the
| truth?
| Delk wrote:
| To be fair, it might not be about the desire to belittle or
| to derive status. I can understand the frustration of those
| who are educated in a demanding field that also happens to
| attract people proposing uneducated and usually unsound
| theories. The wildest of theories -- _especially_ the
| wildest of them -- would often take a lot of work to
| untangle and make sense of to the point where it 's even
| possible to discuss and think about them critically. The
| vast, vast majority of those kinds of theories are wrong
| yet they take a lot of work to disprove. That probably has
| little to offer to the expert other than perhaps exercise
| in the Socratic method with an uncooperative partner.
|
| I'm not in the academia myself but I can totally see how
| the _n_ th time someone offers their "insights" into
| something they almost certainly don't understand could make
| you think of them as crackpots.
| mcguire wrote:
| Further, there's the other half of the psychological
| stew: them as regard education in general and the attempt
| to untangle and think critically about wild theories as
| at best a waste of time and at worst a personal attack. I
| personally don't think of anyone as a "crackpot" unless
| they've demonstrated that they are impervious to the
| basic knowledge they need: " _One or two seemed miffed
| that I didn't immediately exclaim: 'Genius!',..._ "
| ganzuul wrote:
| I would like to avoid to paint in detail the ugly picture
| behind the issue I'm talking about, since that feels like
| a self-fulfilling prophecy. - You are obviously right to
| assume the best about people but it is also prudent to
| remain vigilant whenever there is hierarchy and
| competition for resources.
|
| I don't have a solution... I do have a problem in that
| this drive-by dismissal of mine is getting attention when
| what I was excited about in another comment goes ignored.
| =\
| kbenson wrote:
| > I do have a problem in that this drive-by dismissal of
| mine is getting attention when what I was excited about
| in another comment goes ignored. =\
|
| Isn't that explained by the GP's point? Some things are
| much easier to engage with than others, regardless of
| whether it's for or against. Your statement above is two
| sentences, and while it undoubtedly accurately describes
| some occurrences, it also likely doesn't describe others.
| Without statements to clarify how absolutely you intend
| it to apply, people are free to make their own
| assumptions and if that assumption casts your statement
| as absolutist, it's easy to refute.
|
| Communication can be hard, asynchronous communication
| even more so.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if our school teachers' demand to read
| their minds was justified, and how we can sometimes
| immediately be aware of context in a way that machine
| learning consistently fails at.
|
| The article touches on this in how the author quickly
| deduces who is one of them and who is not. Perhaps
| therein lies the entire issue at hand.
| robocat wrote:
| I mean, one has to wonder how many real physicists are
| chasing crackpot theories in exactly the same sense. The
| drive that results in self-delusion is probably the same
| mentally/emotionally.
|
| Also it isn't just physicists on the receiving end. As a
| software engineer I get people wanting me to help them
| with their "crackpot" business ideas (although they
| sometimes don't want to tell me their secret, and I
| heartily encourage them not to!). I have seen an
| acquaintance explore a crackpot electrical mechanism for
| perpetual energy. Mathematicians surely get their fair
| share of crackpots too!
| Fomite wrote:
| I mean, physicists are _notorious_ for chasing crackpot
| theories in other fields for the exact same reason - they
| assume their background is sufficient to understand the
| current progress of a field, when it 's not.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yeah, like that crackpot Alvarez and his nutty "an
| asteroid killed the dinosaurs" theory!
|
| It turned out to be _right_ , of course.
|
| Sometimes entire fields get stuck in bad equilibria and
| need to be disrupted.
| robocat wrote:
| Yet Physicists sometimes hit the jackpot too:
| "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
| Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
| _3u10 wrote:
| Classic.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Personally I think most of these problems could be easily
| resolved if we were taught the basics of how to manage
| emotions and ego in school. Unfortunately, that essential
| need is still controlled by certain institutional wills
| that I in turn label crackpot. - Not that I should be
| throwing stones, living in a house of glass...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| String theory is crackpot AF. It's not based on Occam's
| razor or empirical observation, just on the fact that if
| you accept a few really giant unfounded assumptions, then
| you end up with some neat math.
|
| We'd be better off with a theory of everything designed
| by a neural network, at least people wouldn't belabor
| under the mistaken assumption that "theory of everything"
| actually corresponds to anything real.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| For a while I held onto this archaic 1950 textbook on
| geology, solely because the introductory chapter included
| something like "the now thoroughly discredited crackpot
| theory of plate tectonics, which we will not consider here."
| antognini wrote:
| When I was a kid I read a book published in the 1980s
| called _Yes We Have No Neutrons_. It covered various
| episodes in pseudoscience like N-rays, cold fusion, and
| Freudian psychology. But there was also a chapter on neural
| networks that did not age very well at all.
| mjburgess wrote:
| The phrase "neural network" is itself a kind of
| pseudoscience, in being neither neural nor a network --
| but an essentially pseudoscientific description of an
| algorithm better called "ensembled regression" or
| something of that kind.
|
| NNs do not model the brain, and have basically nothing to
| do with it. I'd imagine rereading that chapter would be a
| good idea.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Ensemble methods have basically nothing to do with neural
| networks. The output of a NN is not some kind of
| "average" or "best pick" taken from the outputs of
| individual neurons. Rather, there are multiple layers
| each of which performs a kind of generalized multivariate
| regression on the outputs of the previous layer, and the
| parameterization for the whole hierarchy of layers is
| fitted as a whole. Very different.
| mjburgess wrote:
| NNs with dropout are, trivially, an ensembling. And I
| think it's not so hard to show NNs, by default, meet a
| criterion like it -- namely that if we have something
| like batch normalization between the layers, so they are
| something PMF-like, then each is taking an expectation.
|
| either way, the technique has absolutely nothing to do
| with the biological cells we call neurones -- as much as
| decision tress have to do with forests.
|
| It is metaphorical mumbojumbo taken up by a credulous
| press and repeated in research grant proposals by the
| present generation of young jobbing PhDs soon to be out
| of a job.
|
| The whole structure is, as it has ever been, is on the
| verge of a winter brought about by this shysterism. Self-
| driving cars, due in 2016, are likewise "just around the
| corner".
| vajrabum wrote:
| I sympathesize about the overhyping. I certainly don't
| know if it's a good idea or not, but if you work for
| Google driverless cars are already on the road.
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/30/23002082/waymo-
| driverless...
| zarzavat wrote:
| > [A]NNs do not model the brain, and have basically
| nothing to do with it.
|
| ANNs don't yet model the structure of the brain but it
| seems plausible that they could do in the future as the
| result of some "convergent evolution".
|
| ANNs have a fair model of individual neurons. Artificial
| and biological neurons do roughly the same thing when
| evaluated, but they are connected and trained very
| differently.
|
| For me it's too much of a coincidence that the two most
| generally intelligent systems (ANNs and BNNs) are both
| "linear networks of activation functions".
|
| We have not managed to build general intelligence from
| any other formalism, and neither has nature.
|
| Viewing ANNs as a poor model of BNNs may be looking at
| the question backwards. You could say that BNNs are
| trying desperately hard to _model the pure mathematics of
| ANNs_ within the confines of biochemistry. The fact that
| a biological neuron is not exactly a ReLU may say more
| about the limitations of biology rather than the
| limitations of ReLUs.
| peterlk wrote:
| > For me it's too much of a coincidence that the two most
| generally intelligent systems (ANNs and BNNs) are both
| "linear networks of activation functions".
|
| I am unconvinced that "linear network" appropriately
| defines BNNs. Can you clarify this?
| canjobear wrote:
| This is a terminological question which has nothing to do
| with whether a textbook in the 80s was right or not in
| calling neural networks a crockpot theory.
|
| The terminology is now fixed and anyone who has more than
| a passing acquaintance with these things knows that
| neural networks have almost nothing to do with biological
| neurons.
| mjburgess wrote:
| It's a 1997, I've just skim read the chapeter -- and it
| seems entirely correct. Its views here are consistent
| with my own, NN is just a name for a technique -- baring
| little relation to the claims made about it in a
| hysterical press.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| This theory of crackpot theories is popular with the
| crackpots, and I suspect it's a good signal of them. Some
| people do win the lottery, but your lottery ticket is still
| worthless.
| np_tedious wrote:
| That's fun. I had the converse experience when I discovered
| and read an old pop science article that discussed the
| light ether as if it were established fact. I was quite
| young and it was several years until I learned in high
| school physics class that this was complete bunk.
| temporalparts wrote:
| Do you have a picture of the book? Can you post a picture
| of the passage and cover? That would be fascinating to see!
| (I believe you fwiw, not doing the whole "pics or it didn't
| happen" :) )
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The difference between a real crackpot and someone trying to
| understand something difficult is that the former is usually
| genuinely mentally disturbed while the latter is still in
| Dunning-Kruger territory.
|
| Usenet science boards used to have various "personalities"
| who were clearly ill. They would post variations on the same
| word salad over and over, invariably claiming that Einstein
| was wrong about something or other, while they were right,
| which made them super-geniuses.
|
| I understand high-profile physicists particularly tend to
| attract these people, so dealing with them must be a
| challenge, and there must be a temptation to skip over anyone
| who looks like they fall into that group even if they're just
| asking questions.
|
| There was - possibly still is - a crossover group typically
| made of electrical/electronic engineers who knew just enough
| traditional EM theory to be dangerous, but not enough to know
| what they didn't know about GR and QM. For some reason they
| were also obsessed with trying to prove that relativity was
| wrong - perhaps because GR is so weird it's almost
| offensively strange to people who want to live in an un-weird
| universe.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| On sci.math there were a couple of divide-by-zero freaks
| who seemed between them to post about 1000 posts a day.
|
| > GR is so weird
|
| Someone said about Quantum Mechanics that if you understand
| it, you obviously don't. Because it is so weird.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| These characters still exist on Reddit and elsewhere. They
| typically also stick to trying to disprove SR, because it
| barely requires more than high school math. No one ever
| tries to disprove the foundations of condensed matter
| physics.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _No one ever tries to disprove the foundations of
| condensed matter physics._
|
| My contribution to this severely under-served department:
|
| "It can't possibly be correct to use relativistic field
| theory to write effective fields for excitations of a
| wave medium when the whole idea of SR was that there
| wasn't a medium."
| wrycoder wrote:
| That's not the "whole idea" of SR. What he said in his
| 1905 paper was,
|
| _" The introduction of a "luminiferous ether" will prove
| to be /superfluous/ inasmuch as the view here to be
| developed will not require an "absolutely stationary
| space" provided with special properties, nor assign a
| velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which
| electromagnetic processes take place."_
|
| In 1920, after developing GR, his views were considerably
| more nuanced, as expressed in his 1920 lecture at the
| Leyden University, "Ether and the Theory of Relativity":
|
| _" Recapitulating, we may say that according to the
| general theory of relativity space is endowed with
| physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there
| exists an ether. According to the general theory of
| relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in
| such space there not only would be no propagation of
| light, but also no possibility of existence for standards
| of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor
| therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense.
| But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the
| quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting
| of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of
| motion may not be applied to it."_
|
| Einstein, Albert. Sidelights on Relativity . Public
| Domain Books. Kindle Edition. (0.99$ on Amazon)
|
| That lecture, by the way, is a superb example of
| presenting the frontier of 1920 physics - before
| Schrodinger, Dirac, and modern field theory - without
| using any mathematical notation whatsoever.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I believe (although it isn't my field) that Semiconductor
| physics is considered to be ultimately grounded in
| condensed matter physics, right? So we could look at the
| ridiculous idea that transistors could just keep getting
| tinier and tinier as a bit of a crackpot idea. Turns out
| these physicists managed to "yes, and..." their way into
| controlling, what, most of the economy?
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Doesn't condensed matter physics heavily feature harmonic
| analysis? It's a pity -- if math weren't so damn
| difficult, we could point all the "crystal resonance"
| crowd in a productive, fascinating direction.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I'm a mathlet who is working slowly on learning more. Can
| you elaborate on the connection you're drawing?
| [deleted]
| mcguire wrote:
| https://timecube.2enp.com/
| [deleted]
| lumost wrote:
| Anecdotally, Engineers seem to want to prove relativity
| wrong as it places unfortunate limits on the kinds of
| things that could be built. No one is flash gordoning
| around space anytime soon.
|
| On the other hand it also gave us marvelous energy sources
| such as nuclear power. However this connection is often
| missed amongst lay observers.
| ncmncm wrote:
| We would arguably be better off, all around, without
| that, if it meant no atomic bombs.
|
| We weren't getting FTL anyway.
| madengr wrote:
| "There was - possibly still is - a crossover group
| typically made of electrical/electronic engineers who knew
| just enough traditional EM theory to be dangerous, but not
| enough to know what they didn't know about GR and QM."
|
| The same can be said for physicists and mathematicians who
| know just enough EE. As a practicing EE who specializes in
| RF and antennas, I've had to debunk many crackpot antenna
| and circuits, who developers are looking for funding. The
| nice thing about RF is hunks of dielectric and conductor
| are pretty easy to fabricate or simulate, but they don't
| even try to prove their ideas.
| jhowar59 wrote:
| Archimedes Plutonium!
| dagw wrote:
| Now there is a name I haven't heard in a long long
| time...
| pfdietz wrote:
| Robert MacElwaine! Alexander Abian! Tom Van Flandern!
| JackFr wrote:
| For many years if I googled myself, on the first page of
| results was an archived post of Archimedes Plutonium
| calling me out in sci.math.
|
| Ahhhhh, those were the days.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _I understand high-profile physicists particularly tend to
| attract these people, so dealing with them must be a
| challenge, and there must be a temptation to skip over
| anyone who looks like they fall into that group even if
| they 're just asking questions._
|
| I think this is why many profs have a secretary to screen
| this stuff out
| gowld wrote:
| Ironically, that's not what Dunning-Kruger claimed, and the
| Dunning-Kruger research itself has been largely
| discredited. A better term might be the "Dunning-Kruger
| Effect effect" for how these accusations are slung around.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
| #...
| ncmncm wrote:
| I like to say most citations of D-K are examples of D-K.
| cbsmith wrote:
| I think my favourite bit of Dunning-Kruger is that it's
| failure to account for regression towards the mean and
| the better-than-average effect are kind of an existence
| proof of a "Dunning-Kruger Effect". ;-)
| mcguire wrote:
| I don't think that article says what you think it says.
|
| The D-K effect is: " _The Dunning-Kruger effect is
| defined as the tendency of people with low ability in a
| specific area to give overly positive assessments of this
| ability._ " That is exactly what the parent described,
| and is an empirically identified behavior. The criticisms
| are aimed mostly at the "meta-cognitive" and bias-based
| explanations for the behavior.
| pramsey wrote:
| There's a wonderful exploration of "crackpots" in the aptly-
| named "The Crackpots" by Harlan Ellison in his short story
| collection "Paingod" (which is excellent).
| https://sckool.org/paingod-and-other-delusions-harlan-
| elliso...
| robocat wrote:
| Harlan writes about the story: "Think of someone you know,
| even someone you love, trapped into a corrupt or self-
| destructive or anti-social behavior pattern by an inability
| to get around the roadblock of erroneous thinking. [snip]
| Polly wouldn't permit such an evil to exist-as an
| unconscious understanding of the massmind of the general
| Analog readership, which is at core and primarily
| engineers, technicians, scientists, men of the drawing
| board and the spanner. [snip] [I wrote the story] to see if
| I could gig the Analog readers of thirty-and-more years'
| good standing, who would have coronary arrest at seeing
| Ellison in the hallowed pages of their favorite magazine.
| You can imagine my joy when I saw the issue on the
| newsstands, with my name on the front cover with Isaac
| Asimov's, knowing that Analog's faithful would be gagging,
| and knowing the little jibe I had waiting for them
| inside"...
| cmollis wrote:
| I've run a 'crackpot consultant business' for like the past
| 30 years. except in the US it's called the 'Fortune 500'.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I'm not sure that "crackpot" implies malice. To me, it
| implies a totally wrong starting point. You can't build
| astronomy on a foundation of astrology. Using Babylonian
| base-60 mathematics won't help you create a unified field
| theory. The guy who showed me some random velocity that he
| had picked, and taken c^2 divided by that velocity, had not
| shown that faster-than-light travel was possible.
|
| It's like cargo-cult physics. They (try to) do all the
| things, but the starting point is wrong, so it can't work.
|
| So showing them "where to even begin" is in fact the
| solution... if they'll listen.
| exolymph wrote:
| This is admittedly a pedantic nitpicky comment, but humans
| _did_ build astronomy on a foundation of astrology. Much
| like alchemy and the legit techniques used during that
| phase of exploration later got subsumed into chemistry.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I guess most people haven't read any of Newton's writing
| on alchemy. What's fascinating is that he's clearly
| mapping metaphors to experiences, in much the same way he
| did when writing Principia.
|
| The difference is that in P. the metaphors and mappings
| create consistent experiences for everyone and can be
| manipulated symbolically using math.
|
| That's a huge change, which is why science is everywhere
| and hardly anyone attempts alchemy today. But under the
| hood science is still a machine made of metaphors which
| are partial mappings of experience.
|
| I don't think anyone believes all the different metaphors
| physics uses mesh together neatly, so at least some of
| them must be misleading. Improving the coverage is almost
| the definition of physics.
|
| But it's also possible the consistent symbolic metaphor
| approach is limited in ways we don't yet know, and at
| some point it will reach its limits and have to be
| replaced with something else.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I really enjoyed Gleick's biography of Newton, which
| spends a lot of time on both his math and physics work
| that panned out, and his alchemical work that didn't.
|
| Newton is the father of modern physics to us because we
| have perspective that he lacked. At the time he was
| working--in the moment--it wasn't yet clear how the
| universe worked.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| > Newton is the father of modern physics to us because we
| have perspective that he lacked. At the time he was
| working--in the moment--it wasn't yet clear how the
| universe worked.
|
| His trial and error gave that perspective as a result.
| Somebody had to waste time on alchemy to then succeed in
| physics, the time spent on alchemy was not a waste.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| > his alchemical work that didn't.
|
| Call me a crackpot, but didn't it?
|
| Newton is forever remembered as [one of] the
| granddaddy[ies] of physical sciences.
|
| Alchemy, from any initiated source seems to be a series
| of rituals designed around the refining of the self into
| its full potential, rather than a material goal of
| becoming wealthy by being able to produce gold. That is,
| it's metaphorical.
|
| I haven't read anything by Newton on his alchemy, but if
| I were to take my rudimentary understanding of mystical
| thought and read it against Newton's example--I would
| think he were quite successful having produced such novel
| mathematical and scientific breakthroughs--whether he was
| aware of that or not.
|
| If there was gold to be found in a human experience and
| work, I'd say he produced endless amounts of it...
|
| edit: I'm not making it up. Whether or not you want to
| believe in whatever, this is what alchemy is to magicians
| like Newton:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism#Alchemy
|
| He didn't endeavour to just turn physical lead into
| physical gold. I know we shit on humanities around here,
| but facts still exist in that sphere.
|
| Further, this isn't my opinion but that of Keynes - https
| ://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2012.005..
| .
|
| > _Keynes underlined the last sentence of this passage,
| which could easily substitute for his own assessment of
| Newton 's use of experimentation in 'Newton, the Man',
| that 'His experiments were always, I suspect, a means,
| not of discovery, but always of verifying what he knew
| already'.13 Keynes repeatedly referenced Newton's
| 'intuition', calling it 'pre-eminently extraordinary',
| almost to the point of relying on mathematical proof and
| experiment only as a matter of social convention, rather
| than as a means of revealing some insight that had not
| already occurred to him. The mathematical proofs in
| Principia were alleged to be 'dressed up afterwards--they
| were not the instrument of discovery.'_
| buescher wrote:
| The purely metaphorical interpretation of alchemy is
| popular in some circles, but alchemy has a clear
| experimental basis. Newton did some pretty wild
| alchemical experiments. Metals are weird.
|
| https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/videos-recreate-
| isaac-ne...
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > if they'll listen
|
| This is where I find the line easier to draw. Starting from
| a wrong premise and reaching a wrong conclusion (even if
| reached rationally and logically) does not, itself, make a
| crackpot. The crackpot is the one who won't listen to the
| counterarguments. And when they do listen, they just shift
| the goalposts instead of actually adjusting their basis to
| better fit reality.
| epgui wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| A looser, less perfect, but more easily applicable and
| economical heuristic that I have is:
|
| - Is my (layperson) interlocutor mostly contrarian and
| skeptical of others? Then there is very little chance
| that trying to point them in the right direction will be
| productive. Being a reasonable contrarian requires a very
| high level of expertise.
|
| - Is my interlocutor mostly curious and skeptical of
| their own understanding? Then my friend, this person is a
| rare golden perl, and I will spare no effort or patience,
| because in almost every case these people are the ones
| who haven't lost the capacity to learn.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I'm not sure that "crackpot" implies malice.
|
| It pidgeon-holes and ridicules people, we know it's
| insulting, and we use it anyway - that seems close enough
| to malicious.
| kragen wrote:
| Assuming a unified field theory is possible, it is surely
| equally correct in any numerical base; calculations in base
| 60 will give you the same results as calculations in base
| 2, base 10, base 1/2(1 + [?]5), base 2 _i_ , or any other
| base.
| mcguire wrote:
| If I understand the parent correctly, he's referring to
| the specific idea that base 60 math leads directly to the
| "right" answer, that solves the unsolved problems. I
| don't remember who was promulgating that idea, but the
| response you made (a) is correct, and (b) was rejected by
| the "crackpot" as not understanding the idea.
| kragen wrote:
| Oh, like how the Larouche nutcases promote 256-Hz tuning
| because of solitons?
| dahdum wrote:
| > In some sense, labeling somebody a "crackpot" assigns a
| sort of malicious wrongness to them.
|
| The naive enthusiasm, self directed exploration, and passion
| many of these crackpots have are winning traits in many
| pursuits. Just a bit of poor luck they picked an especially
| high wall to scale with theoretical physics.
| [deleted]
| buescher wrote:
| Most impressive: "One of them might even publish a paper soon.
| Not a proposal for a theory of everything, mind you, but a new
| way to look at a known effect. A first step on a long journey."
| Hossenfelder must have the patience of Job and a deep teaching
| vocation.
|
| If you are ever even around physics or math at all, you will
| see the crackpot letters. I was a little surprised engineers
| are largely unaware of the phenomenon and are shocked, for
| example, that anyone seriously tries to make perpetual motion
| machines at all.
|
| Here's a couple links about the mathematical equivalent:
|
| https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/beware-cranks
|
| https://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/whattodowhentrisectorcomes.pdf
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| "What to do when the trisector comes" is very interesting and
| illuminating and worth reading.
|
| In addition, I believe the article demonstrates that in these
| cases, the facts people are discussing and debating are only
| part of the picture: there is an emotional undercurrent to
| what they are saying.
|
| Dr. Carl Rogers would likely argue that facts would only
| change their minds if they felt properly heard / seen /
| understood.
|
| For example:
|
| > One summer I went to visit three trisectors... My first
| trisector was... enormously pleased to see me and couldn't
| stop talking. He was bursting with energy and couldn't keep
| still... We talked about his trisection and I tried (I was
| younger then, and not as wise) to show him the error of his
| ways. He _seemed_ to be listening to what I was saying, but
| none of it was making any impression.
|
| I'm not saying "feed the trolls," only that there is more
| going on than meets the eye.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| That second link was a particularly entertaining read. Thanks
| for sharing.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| When I was in Physics this dude from off campus stapled up
| all these posters that said the inverse square law was
| rubbish and to come to a conference room in the library on a
| certain day.
|
| There were like 10+ physicists and 10+ grad students in this
| meeting, they respectful when they smoked this time crystal
| guy, but of course he just used it as an example of the cabal
| keeping the truth down.
| robocat wrote:
| From beware cranks (1st link): The
| mathematical physicist John Baez proposed a "crackpot
| index"[1] [snip] Mathematician Chris Caldwell was
| inspired by Baez's list and devised a mathematical version.
| Some (lightly edited) examples from Caldwell's list are
| 1 point for each word in all capital letters; 5 points
| for every statement that is clearly vacuous, logically
| inconsistent, or widely known to be false; 10 points
| for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful
| correction; 10 points for not knowing (or not using)
| standard mathematical notation; 10 points for
| expressing fear that your ideas will be stolen; 10
| points for each new term you invent or use without properly
| defining it; 10 points for stating that your ideas are
| of great financial, theoretical, or spiritual value; 10
| points for beginning the description of your work by saying
| how long you have been working on it; 10 points for
| each favorable comparison of yourself to established experts;
| 10 points for citing an impressive-sounding, but irrelevant,
| result; 20 points for naming something after yourself;
| 30 points for not knowing how or where to submit their major
| discovery for publication; 30 points for confusing
| examples or heuristics with mathematical proof; 40
| points for claiming to have a "proof" of an important result
| but not knowing what established mathematicians have done on
| the problem.
|
| [1] https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
|
| Edit: The second link has a scanned advert at the end from
| 1983 for "The Science of Programming" by David Gries: the
| title of the book amuses me.
| more_corn wrote:
| Remember when google offered that "ideas to save the planet"
| contest? I used to wade through those.
|
| They fell into a couple easy categories. Perpetual motion
| machines, casual ideas that are obviously impractical,
| fundamentally failing to understand the subject area. Not a
| single one of them seemed new or useful.
|
| Then again Nicola Tesla had some strange ideas. Turns out
| half of them were brilliant and the other half still seem
| weird. Efforts to demarcate crackpot and real might be
| approaching the problem from the wrong direction.
|
| I like the author's strategy of helping people gain the
| knowledge to understand what they're trying to talk about.
| Teslas ideas about motion and flow as it pertains to physical
| health were weird but that doesn't mean he was unable to
| learn about biology, had he spent time learning about it,
| maybe he'd have brought his ideas back to reality and
| contributed something interesting.
|
| We should celebrate people for their curiosity, encourage
| them to gain the knowledge that has already been discovered
| and help them express their ideas in ways that others can
| relate to.
| tom-thistime wrote:
| "Of course, this writing often isn't for the layperson,"
|
| How do you mean? I think of popular science writing as always
| being for the layperson.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you're one of
| us
|
| I feel the same way about computer programming/computer
| programmers, but we get into trouble for saying things like
| that...
| mynegation wrote:
| This is awesome! I watched multiple videos by Sabine. She stays
| on popular level there, pretty much like the journalists she
| mentions.
|
| I am interested in physics. I am one of those middle aged men.
| Not that I aspire to suddenly come up with a theory of everything
| that people who dedicated their life to it could not think of. I
| am just curious. I have a solid applied mathematical background
| with all the usual basics like linear algebra, real and complex
| calculus, functional analysis, information theory, probability,
| statistics, ODEs and PDEs, but I quickly realized that I would
| need to fill multiple gaps in my math before understanding modern
| physics: quarternions, tensors, Lie groups and algebras,
| differential geometry etc. so I am slowly working through this.
|
| My problem is: it is pretty hard for me to find a good set of
| books/textbooks that fill the specific gaps in my math knowledge.
| I even started to work on DAG of areas and associated textbooks
| myself but any pointers would be appreciated.
| mathgenius wrote:
| You already should be able to get the basics of quantum
| physics. Have you tried starting there? (Feynman Vol III is a
| good place to start.) Or are you more interested in general (or
| special) relativity? Definitely check out John Baez's TWF's
| [1].
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.04168
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