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What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists

563 points by tbrownaw 10y ago

drauh 10y ago
I've had my share trying to convince someone that a perpetual motion system they described did not conserve energy or momentum. They refused to believe my assertion that momentum and energy were conserved quantities.
- _polymer_ 10y ago
  But what if you were paid to convince them?
  - drauh 10y ago
    It was a long forum discussion, and well over a dozen engineers, mathematicians, and physicists kept saying the same thing. Some wrong long (>500 word) posts. We were all ignored. This person was invested in the idea that they had an insight that centuries' worth of work had overlooked.
jxy 10y ago
It is a good form of communicating sciences. Seriously, more professors should do it as their contributions to community. Perhaps starting from more reddit AMA?
- johan_larson 10y ago
  That's a big ask. Scholars tend to be rewarded for their contributions to advancing the field itself, not for improving relations with outsiders. Heck, these people can barely be bothered to deal with undergrads, never mind the general public. And really, they have little to gain from doing so. The general citizenry doesn't judge research output (publishing), and they don't directly provide the means of carrying it out (funding), so any attention directed their way is basically a waste for working scholars.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    It is a big ask as you say, but failing to do so is costing science the trust of the lay public. A public that doesn't understand science will vote to burn all the oil, give measles to all the children, and try to mine the moon for cheese.
    - thansharp 10y ago
      Tragedy of the commons. It definitely benefits everyone if some people stood up, but it's in no one's specific personal interests to be at a comparative disadvantage due to this.
  - rjsw 10y ago
    Charles Simonyi has funded the post of Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University [1]. There are a few other similar posts elsewhere. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simonyi_Professor_for_the_Public_Understanding_of_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simonyi_Professor_for_the_Publ...
- mkehrt 10y ago
  Check out /r/askhistorians, if you aren't familiar with it.
Analemma_ 10y ago
This is a fun article, and also a useful reminder that although Hacker News tends to mythologize autodidacts, the boring reality is that in disciplines other than programming, the overwhelming majority of them are useless cranks.
- pdkl95 10y ago
  > the overwhelming majority of them are useless cranks I think you missed the point of the article. Most of these "cranks" are people trying to learn. They are excited about science and are trying to reconcile the bits of knowledge they have been able to accumulate from often-terrible sources (poor quality education system[1], mass media, "science journalism" that leaves out the science). Carl Sagan discusses this type of person in the beginning "The Demon Haunted World", where he talks about a cab driver who was really excited to meet "that scientist guy" (Sagan). The cab diver's excitement faded quickly when Sagan's answers about his pseudo-scientific questions tended to be "sorry, that doesn't exist". Sagan also observed that the cab driver was almost completely ignorant of the actual discoveries of modern science. "[He] had heard virtually nothing of modern science. He had a natural appetite for the wonders of the Universe. He wanted to know about science. It's just that all the science had gotten filtered out before it reached him. Our cultural motifs, or educational system, our communications media had failed this man. What the society permitted to trickle through was mainly pretense and confusion. It had never taught him how to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation. He knew nothing about how science works."[2] I commend Sabine Hossenfelder for finding a creative way to approach the difficult task of teaching people even when they seem like a "crank". This is important work because a successful democracy depends on the people having sufficient education. Instead of calling people "cranks", try to see things from their point of view and try to point them on a proper path towards a proper understanding science. Ignoring or insulting "cranks" leaves them isolated and ignorant; teaching them how to use a "baloney detection kit"[3] and maybe their enthusiasm can be reorientated to real science. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-... [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=Yz8Y6KfXf9UC&pg=PT22 https://books.google.com/books?id=Yz8Y6KfXf9UC&pg=PT22 [3] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Fine_Art_of_Baloney_Detection http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Fine_Art_of_Baloney_Detecti...
erroneousfunk 10y ago
I'm hardly a physicist, but I have a degree in "general engineering" (long story about how I managed to escape specialization there) and a master's in software engineering, and I've taken a few advanced math courses, including partial differential equations, computational theory, scientific computing, and a math-heavy course on relativity. I also spent a year and a half working for a Harvard physics professor, alongside his team of grad students. So, while I can't "do physics" I think I know enough to understand a little about what it takes to _be_ a physicist, and appreciate the work that they do. My husband and I were listening to a radio program (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a-little-bit-of-knowledge http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a...) about a man convinced that he had found a mistake in Einstein's theory of relativity, and trying to communicate this idea to a physicist (futilely, obviously). My husband, who was a music major for a year before dropping out of college, and I started getting in an argument about this episode that was so heated, I felt like we were listening to two completely different stories! I kept insisting that the advanced math and education wasn't just some funsies shibboleth the physicists had to keep the hoi polloi out of physics -- the devil's in the details and the man in the story didn't even understand the big picture correctly. My husband was angry and insulted that the physicist dismissed the man's theory out of hand, and felt that anyone could make a contribution to physics with perhaps a little help from a calculus book -- just look at history! I thought the hero of the story (if there was one) was clearly the physicist, while my husband was solidly on the side of the electrician with a little learning, trying dangerous things. I was really shocked. We don't usually fight like that, and especially over something so seemingly trivial, but, in retrospect, I thought that it displayed huge tension in society as a whole, between academics and non-academics. We hear so much about the "one percent" and income-based class distinctions, but relatively little about academic barriers in society, whether real or artificially imposed. Should physics open up in a real way (not just "pop science" articles and occasional books for laymen)? Should we put a stronger "academic" focus in early public and high school education? Should we provide more resources for "physicists who just need a little help with the math" whether they're right or wrong? Although I was staunchly in favor of the hallowed halls of academe, and it still holds a special place in my heart, I suspect that the correct solution lies somewhere in the middle. Anyway, fantastic article, and it really brings up an important point that is too seldom addressed, by physicists, or society as a whole!
angrow 10y ago
If we need a more neutral term than "crank", rather than "autodidact," why not "outsider"? An outsider artist is anyone who creates art not easily dismissed, despite not participating in the social and academic communities of their medium, so why can't there be outsider scientists and engineers as well?
- Analog24 10y ago
  There is a big difference here. In physics, the "outsiders" are easily dismissed. It's just that the outsiders themselves usually don't accept that they're just flat out wrong and convince themselves that it's the establishment working against them.
  - Kinnard 10y ago
    Haven't many outsiders become insiders? Or really even . . . beatified? I recall some famous scientists being forced to recant and being . . . completely right. I additionally wouldn't by the argument that the scientific community was on his side. The "community in power" was not on his side. And that's what matters.
    - tdb7893 10y ago
      The vast majority of those situations are where the people are already scientists and experts in their field. We are talking about people who are not experts in physics.
epistasis 10y ago
>My clients almost exclusively get their information from the popular science media. Often, they get something utterly wrong in the process. Once I hear their reading of an article about, say, space-time foam or black hole firewalls, I can see where their misunderstanding stems from. But they come up with interpretations that never would have crossed my mind when writing an article. This isn't just physics articles, and isn't just cranks. Most of the popular reporting on science gets things very wrong. I can't say whether physics is more correct or less correct, but I think I notice less eye-rolling and complaints from physicists about popular news articles than I do from other fields. Something to keep in mind for people that are getting their science news from the media.
- Analog24 10y ago
  As a (former) physicist I have to say that there is plenty of eye-rolling about how physics is portrayed in the news. However, in any branch of modern physics it is accepted that no news article aimed at the general public could ever possibly convey the science with complete accuracy. Simply because it requires years of study and specialization to really understand it. I did my graduate research at the LHC and I was there when the Higgs boson was discovered. I can't tell you how many people (non physicists) came to me with questions about it that were completely misguided because of it's misrepresentation in the news ("God particle" - holy mother of terrible catch phrases). But at the same time how can anyone expect to convey the full scope of the Standard Model in a news article? The problem isn't that simplifying science with nice metaphors and analogies is wrong, it's that people who read the articles don't understand that what they're reading is just that: a nice metaphor or analogy. People think that because the science is dumbed down for a general audience that it must be simple enough for a general audience to understand. Unfortunately, that has not been the case in physics (and most other fields) for over a hundred years and never will be again.
  - th0ma5 10y ago
    Often I wish articles were written targeting a person with an undergrad or grad degree in physics rather than the typical 6th grade reading level. If people don't understand stuff they can google it or just not read the article.
rupellohn 10y ago
I recommend 'Physics on the Fringe' for anyone interested in this topic http://physicsonthefringe.com/page/about-book http://physicsonthefringe.com/page/about-book
erdevs 10y ago
I wonder if this is changing with things like online education and the wealth of real information and in-depth knowledge on the internet. It seems self-teaching is much, much more viable today and I imagine that younger generations of autodidacts might not be so ill-informed on the whole.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  I have taken about 70 courses by now - about 1/3 of them "hard", the rest more like "Nutrition for Horses", on edX and Coursera mostly. From the courses currently offered on the major course sites it seems they limit themselves to courses taught during the first two years of college - and many courses are dumbed-down to a "general public" level. There are a few exceptions, for example the quantum mechanics courses on edX, but they really are exceptions. You can get more demanding courses on the university learning websites themselves, for example https://lagunita.stanford.edu/ https://lagunita.stanford.edu/ for Stanford. The breadth of the courses and course-takers is focused on the basics though. That doesn't mean it's all easy and dumbed-down - a course like "Medical Neuroscience" on Coursera (excellent, by the way, the professor is a wonderful teacher - https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience) have a workload of >15 hours/week. It still is "only" an introductory course though. I think you can sure get the basics via online education, and that means "university level basics". The main problem I see with more advanced courses is that you need to test your level of understanding and have it challenged on a high level, way more than is good for an online course. That's because those tests, if they are any good, is going to show you the huge gaping holes you still have in your knowledge, and for an online course that's too discouraging.
  - kaybe 10y ago
    These tests are also really really hard to do automatically. The usual way here during education is to get a worksheet parallelly to the lecture every week, work through the problems and hand them in for correction and grading. If it's easy, the solution and correction are straight-forward. But if it's hard, as, say, some mathematical proof, sometimes a lot of knowledge and work goes into determining the correctness of the solution. And these are the problems that I feel changed the structure of my mind over the years. And then, even if things are easy to determine right or wrong, as for a coding assignment, people still profit immensely from getting good feedback on their work, from qualified people (and not peer-grading like online courses occasionally do).
schoen 10y ago
I get the e-mail for the EFF Cooperative Computing Awards https://www.eff.org/awards/coop https://www.eff.org/awards/coop so, despite having put lots of effort into not having people make spurious claims, I hear from a whole lot of math cranks. Two things that I find striking are many people's level of confidence that they can personally "solve the problem" (in this case, by inventing some kind of "formula for primes" that has eluded the organized mathematics world for decades), and many people's lack of understanding of what a solution would consist of (in terms of knowing that mathematical proofs exist, and being able to understand whether they have a theorem or just a conjecture). Our situation is especially tricky because we chose a problem that experts said would require lots of computational resources and couldn't be solved by new mathematical insight, but then we didn't outright forbid people from trying to solve it by insight. So a lot of people see an exciting challenge, like "they think it will take a lot of computer time, but if I can just see the pattern, I can skip all of that!". Also, we have a large monetary reward for solutions and so people are excited by the idea that they have them and are about to receive a bunch of money. I think it's true that many of the people who contact me about this are excited about mathematics in the way that people who contacted Dr. Hossenfelder were excited about physics (and, as pdkl95 said, that Carl Sagan's cab driver was excited about science). But it's still frustrating that, after we've gone to some lengths to say that you need a proof and not just a guess, and that decades of research indicate that you can't find primes of this size without significant computer time, people are still so confident that their guesses are right and so resistant to accepting that they haven't met the awards criteria. It would be interesting to see an equivalent service for talking to mathematicians and to see what some of the people who contact us might get out of it, and whether it might inspire them to pursue more constructive things. (I always wish that our awards would motivate someone to start doing Project Euler problems or something...) If someone set up that "talk to a mathematician" service, I would probably try to send lots of people their way.
- drauh 10y ago
  Oh god. "Formula for primes" - I was involved in a way too long forum discussion where everyone involved was trying to convince the guy putting forth his idea for generating primes that he was merely going round in circles, proving and reproving identities. As a former physicist, I think that math is way harder to talk about to laypeople, though there can be a wide variation in difficulty by subfield. Maybe number theory can be accessible, but analysis, say, would be pretty opaque. Not to mention some of the more exotic branches of math.
forgotpwtomain 10y ago
> 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. So generally for sciences (and for compsci cranks as well) we have a direct answer because either your theories can be experimentally verified or they cannot. This is normally a solid position but it puts for example the decades of work on string theory in a bind - since they haven't produced a single verifiable result either. So the author offers a tangential and more broadly encompassing but subjectively experiential position: > 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. Sure, that's great you've verified membership in a social group - but that's really insufficient when you are trying to identify crank science. This sentence can also be applied to all kinds of cults and secular belief systems, hell, I think most of academic humanities fall under this as well. Anecdotal - I know someone who is a well accomplished researcher in their respective experimental physics field (with numerous citations), as a hobby they also happen to have an interest in theoretical physics, where they have published several papers entirely to no response (which to my understanding would be pretty awesome of they were not incorrect) . So it's not just in and out of 'professional physics', the number of people specializing in a particular area can be very small and closed off in an even more domain particular kind of way.
- deleted 10y ago
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- selimthegrim 10y ago
  If you read many many scientific articles for a living, you can begin to tell from the writing style whether this is a crank or not.
ARothfusz 10y ago
This is exactly developer support for "open source" physics.
sevenless 10y ago
Seems to bear comparison to phone sex lines, in that you're satisfying a basic human need - in this case, to be listened to. John Baez keeps a 'Crackpot Index' score at http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
- Animats 10y ago
  "50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions." Unfortunately, that describes string theory, as Smolin keeps pointing out.
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    Depending on your view, that might not be especially unfortunate. (String theory is, IMO, solidly a crackpot hypothesis until they start using the scientific method.)
  - mathgenius 10y ago
    Do you know what Witten has said in response to this criticism? That string theory predicts gravity. :-)
    - selimthegrim 10y ago
      I like how apparently everyone dismisses string theory predicting Bethe Ansatz results as immaterial largely because no one outside of condensed matter and some math people bothers learning about BA.
Xcelerate 10y ago
Whenever I talk about physics (to non-scientists), I notice that people have a tendency to start veering away from the math and onto irrelevant metaphysical tangents. For instance, I'll be trying to explain the history of renormalization in quantum field theory, and someone will suggest, "Well maybe we don't really understand infinity". No, we understand "infinity" just fine. It's a concept that's clearly defined using a set of axioms that have been around for thousands of years. "Well maybe the mathematicians are wrong." I start losing my patience pretty quickly at this point. The other big one that annoys me is "Well it's just a theory". Sure, and gravity is just a theory too. If you doubt it, you're free to go skydiving without a parachute, but personally, I'm not taking any chances.
- mindcrime 10y ago
  someone will suggest, "Well maybe we don't really understand infinity". No, we understand "infinity" just fine. It's a concept that's clearly defined using a set of axioms that have been around for thousands of years. I am not a mathematician, but my understanding is that a considerable amount of research into how to properly address /use infinity in math was ongoing as recently as the early 20th century. Not that I disagree with your overall point though.
  - lasfter 10y ago
    The issue is that there are different infinities. The infinity the parent is talking about, the one that you generally run into in calculus class and the like, is straightforward. The research in the past century was about what happens _past_ infinity, e.g. ordinal numbers. I'm no mathematician either, so I'll stop there before I embarrass myself. The most accessible resource I found was this VSauce video [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrU9YDoXE88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrU9YDoXE88
    - mindcrime 10y ago
      That was a very interesting video, thanks for sharing. Now I'm going to be addicted to VSauce...
mindcrime 10y ago
Some of these folks could probably benefit from reading a book that I just bought: The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need To Know To Start Doing Physics. https://www.amazon.com/Theoretical-Minimum-Start-Doing-Physics/dp/0465075681 https://www.amazon.com/Theoretical-Minimum-Start-Doing-Physi... It's a cool book... written to be relatively accessible, but is actually grounded in the real principles and math used in physics. As somebody who considers himself an autodidact of sorts (in that I'm as much self-taught as formally educated), but who has some awareness of "what I don't know" (and therefore doesn't sit around coming up with crackpot theories about quantum mechanics and what-not), I love this kind of stuff. One of the authors is Leonard Susskind who is pretty credible. This is a book that is serious, but succinct (as you might guess from the title). Note that there is also a companion volume that is specifically about Quantum Mechanics. https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Theoretical-Leonard-Susskind/dp/0465062903/ https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Theoretical-Leonard... All of that said, I do think it's important to note (as others already have) that "autodidact != crank". Plenty of autodidacts are just people who study physics (or whatever) because they find it interesting, but they are aware of their limitations and don't pretend to have amazing new insights that have escaped physics for decades, etc. Likewise I'm pretty sure you can find cranks who have a formal education as well.
- deleted 10y ago
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- Dr_Jefyll 10y ago
  > autodidact != crank This. Unless you consider Charles Darwin, Oliver Heaviside, James Watt and Thomas Edison cranks. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, as you can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts
  - j2kun 10y ago
    That being said, there are cranks on that list.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
keithpeter 10y ago
"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." Any chance of on-boarding via experimental work/data analysis in some way like in Astronomy? http://www.iau.org/public/themes/citizen-science-projects/ http://www.iau.org/public/themes/citizen-science-projects/
mrcactu5 10y ago
Many base their theories on images, downloaded or drawn by hand, embedded in long pamphlets. A few use basic equations. Some add videos or applets. Some work with 3D models of Styrofoam, cardboard or wires. Actually these are perfectly good ways of communicating ideas and solving problems.
- rsp1984 10y ago
  Yes, apart from the long pamphlets.
- Analog24 10y ago
  I don't think the author is suggesting that diagrams and visualizations are inherently bad. In fact, the vast majority of physics is done with help of diagrams. Even modern particle physics (Feynman diagrams). I believe the author is pointing out that a lot of people see a cartoon diagram in a news article and treat it like a scaled blueprint of the theory/concept.
panglott 10y ago
This strikes me more as a success of science journalism (people are inspired to improve their understanding of physics) and a failure of science education (intelligent, motivated amateurs receive no support outside of formal education). Along these lines, is there a good recommended contemporary popular work on quantum physics for non-physicists?
- ivan_ah 10y ago
  The "mechanics" of QM is linear algebra, so you should get a good base in LA before looking into QM. My upcoming book on LA has chapter on QM, specifically "matrix" quantum mechanics, which is the subset of quantum physics phenomena that can be represented using finite-dimensional vectors, matrices, projections, etc. For the full "physicsy" QM course, you'll need to learn about the wave function formalism, which is a bit more complicated...
- Ono-Sendai 10y ago
  I am considering writing a blog post series on 'Quantum physics for programmers', would you find that interesting?
pklausler 10y ago
A very long time ago, I worked for Seymour Cray. He received a surprising amount of crank mail (and back then, it was real postal mail, not e-mail). His secretary filtered out the crank mail, spared him from it, and was good enough to pass the best stuff on to some of the engineers that would appreciate it. I still have some of it, including a long treatise from an inmate at the county jail who had a theory of interplanetary transportation involving kangaroos whose energy output would be measured in "gigahops". EDIT: two minor typos
- sevensor 10y ago
  I'm tremendously amused by the kangaroo theory!
  - pklausler 10y ago
    I suppose that we'd be talking about "exahops" today.
  - 77pt77 10y ago
    Better than turtles I suppose.
- DigitalPhysics 10y ago
  1.21 GigaHops!? 1.21 GigaHops!!?!
atemerev 10y ago
This guy have secured himself so much good karma. Wow. Thank you, from all us autodidacts. (I am trying to learn some astrophysics as a hobby. Amateur science is currently mostly frowned upon).
- whorleater 10y ago
  I wouldn't say amateur science is frowned upon, more than a lack of proper foundation can lead you astray pretty quickly, which is why most "amateurs" manage to convince themselves of some big metaphysical truth. The learning of science is heavily encouraged, but it should definitely be done through proper means.
- neogodless 10y ago
  (girl)
  - atemerev 10y ago
    Whoops. My fault. I thought I checked it. I didn't.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- brohee 10y ago
  Astronomy is actually the field where amateurs make the most useful contributions, and amateurs/pro collaborations are actually a thing. Close enough to astrophysics?
j2kun 10y ago
> 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? Just the other day I went to a talk by a prestigious physicist who, on top of telling only half-truths _at best_, made all of these mistakes and more. And the audience ate it up! As a mathematician and guy-who-writes-about-math-online, it makes me feel very frustrated. I also realized the difference between a physicist and a mathematician: a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the truth for the sake of press, while a mathematician sticks to the truth and as a result nobody cares.
- martincmartin 10y ago
  a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the truth for the sake of press, while a mathematician sticks to the truth and as a result nobody cares. I think it goes deeper than this. I was in the same undergraduate mathematics and physics classes as Nima Arkani-Hamed[1]. In calculus class, we learned very formal, epsilon-delta calculus (from Spivak's textbook). In physics, we learned from Feynman's Lectures on Physics. Years later I went to lunch with him, and he mentioned that he spent much of his time fighting the formalist instincts from our Calculus class, and thinking more intuitively about mathematics. I do think physicists play more fast-and-loose with mathematics, e.g. using approximations like a few terms from a Taylor series, or other assumptions. When talking to the public, I can see how that would turn into playing fast-and-loose with the facts in order to "project" their knowledge into the space spanned by laypeople's knowledge, even if that projection loses important aspects of the work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nima_Arkani-Hamed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nima_Arkani-Hamed
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lifeisstillgood 10y ago
This is an awesome example of real down in the dirt science communication. I'm impressed
martincmartin 10y ago
There are many people who decide not to go into research but enter industry instead. Some of them don't have the intellectual chops, but others are turned off by the politics, long hours that professors work, spending more time writing grant proposals and managing students than doing research, etc. Some of them have spare time, or maybe will have spare time after their kids are grown, or will be able to retire early. Then they could become citizen scientists [1], independent scientists [2], etc. I wonder how to organize and encourage them? How to redirect or weed out the cranks, and encourage those who are motivated and can look at things from a new perspective? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist
- j2kun 10y ago
  I like this idea, but how much time would be spent re-teaching the citizen scientists the prerequisites needed to do research? Since most of the knowledge at the forefront of research is in papers and not books, that seems like the biggest hurdle.
  - cbHXBY1D 10y ago
    It would be up to the citizen scientist to keep up with newly published papers. I think it would be interesting to create an environment that encourages the hobby scientist to follow the forefront of research. Maybe something like the Recurse Center but for maths and physics. I'm not sure where the funding would come from since the Recurse Center seems to make money from corporate recruiting. Maybe universities?
    - maverick_iceman 10y ago
      Nothing's stopping them even now (at least in most theoretical sciences). Almost all books and papers are freely if not always legally available in the internet. If they discover something they can write up a paper and submit it to an appropriate journal.
  - 10y ago
martincmartin 10y ago
Einstein famously couldn't find a teaching position after graduation, spent 2 years unemployed, then worked as a patent clerk in a patent office. According to wikipedia: "Much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time." So there's two lessons here, I think: 1. People outside academia can still make important contributions, and 2. spending a lot of time thinking about other people's proposals, separating the good from the bad, and inspire a new, fruitful way of looking at things, or at least overcoming standard mental traps.
- noahlt 10y ago
  Keep in mind that Einstein still went to grad school for physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kleiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kleiner
api 10y ago
I've been fascinated for a long time by just how much effective autodidactism there is in software vs. other fields. There are tons of people who have made major contributions here that are completely self-taught. Software is uniquely suited to autodidactism for three reasons: (1) The tools are easy to obtain and easy to start using. Capital cost is low to non-existent. (2) The learning feedback loop is nearly instantaneous and the results are almost always perfectly objective. Things either work or they don't. There is not much room for delusional or wishful thinking. (3) Resources for learning are readily available and are mostly written in a style that is utilitarian and straightforward rather than cliquish and arcane. Theoretical physics passes on point #1 until you hit the need to do serious experimentation, but it fails on points #2 and #3. There is no command prompt that will tell you in 10ms if a theory is at least rational and internally consistent, and advanced mathematics has an arcane symbology and jargon that seems almost intentionally designed to resist penetration by those outside the academic circles where it is used and taught.
- fritzo 10y ago
  I think (2) is the crux. You can deceive yourself about your completeness of understanding, but you can't implement an idea in code until you understand (or are at least aware of) a complete set of components.
netcan 10y ago
This is a fun idea for a service. I happened to read 3 articles this week on labour productivity. My economics is undergraduate level with 15 years of rust, but I had an idea. I thought I was brilliant for the rest of the day. But, I'd like to know if my idea is an existing theorem, wrong for some reason I don't understand or (most likely) a novel, brilliant idea that economists just overlooked. Dunno if I'd pay $50 to find out. 34.99 tops, maybe. :)
- morgante 10y ago
  At the very least, you should write it up and post it. There are some people with more direct economics knowledge on HN.
dekhn 10y ago
While I agree with plenty the author wrote, I have seen plenty of people who are great with math, can speak the language, know how to promote their results in pubs and conferences, and yet are still completely and totally wrong. My best example is a smart physics graduate that I went to grad school (in biophysics) with. An open problem at the time was how motor proteins couple the energy in ATP hydrolosis to directed motion. I said one day, "hmm, maybe it works like this..." and she said, "oh no, my advisor and I proved that mechanism was impossible." A few years go by, we're getting ready to graduate. I ask her, "so, since you spent the last 7 years studying motor proteins, how do they work?" And she told me it was the mechanism I had proposed. I said, "but you disproved that!". And she said, "well, then I collected data, and it turns out our assumptions are wrong." I constantly end up arguing with quantitative people in my own old field- for example, I used to argue with people who did GWAS, they insisted all their stats were great and perfect, then Ionnides and others showed their stats were abysmal, and they were massively overconfident in their results. This is not to say all the cranks are right- they are almost certainly wrong. Anybody who attempts to get around the second law of thermodynamics is going to lose, unless there is something truly and fundamentally wrong with statistical mechanics.
hardlianotion 10y ago
The bit that I take from this is a scientist who is taking on a mission to explain himself fully, to people who make an effort and give a damn. Very easy to call people like this cranks, and rather hard to make something positive come out of the engagement in many cases. I suspect the fact that money is involved goes some way to making this initiative a success.
lcvella 10y ago
That is why I believe society is not getting what it is paying for in physics and mathematics. Too much of the funds invested in physics knowledge is from taxpayers money, and all the knowledge produced is useless if we can't get it back and, with due dedication, understand it. I always felt most of the modern physics knowledge is completely inaccessible to me. The latest physics book I could read and understand was one by Einstein himself, "Relativity: The Special and General Theory", which is 100 years old. When I tackled to learn quantum mechanics, I couldn't find good accessible (cost-wise) material, and the supposedly good book appointed by a physicist friend of mine cost more than $100 on Amazon (which is about 1/3 of the minimum wage of where country I live). I end up buying the Indian print of the book much cheaper. But there was no chance I could read it at the time, because of my lack of calculus basis, what made me watch the entire Udacity course on differential equations. Thanks to that, I had the bare minimum to be accepted in a PhD program on mechanical engineering (I am MSc on Computer Science) to work on computational fluid dynamics. Now, halfway through an engineering PhD, I believe am (more) able to tackle the QM book (look all that took me!) That is why I deeply value the effort of Udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy and such, because without real efforts to bring actual knowledge to public, in an accessible way (both cost and didactic-wise), modern physics and mathematics are a waste of money on private clubs.
- 77pt77 10y ago
  > I always felt most of the modern physics knowledge is completely inaccessible to me. Maybe you are just intellectually inadequate. I'm inadequate to run the 100m in less than 15s or even to finish a marathon in less than 2h. Doesn't mean these things are generally inaccessible.
  - gsteinb88 10y ago
    Well, the entire human race is inadequate to run a marathon in less than 2h so far...
    - 77pt77 10y ago
      You're absolutely right, that was a typo. I meant 3 hours. I don't think I could finish in less than a day at all...
jsprogrammer 10y ago
>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. Sorry, but this is an admission of pseudoscience. All apparently in the name of committing an ad hominem. It is commendable that the author is helping others to get answers to their questions, but this article indicates that there are substantial issues to be dealt with.
- Analog24 10y ago
  Although it is a bit of a jab, I wouldn't call it an ad hominem. And this is no way an admission of pseudoscience. She is simply saying that in physics it's (usually) easy to tell when someone doesn't know what they're talking about. Mainly because the amount of prerequisite material needed to understand and contribute to cutting edge physics is likely quite a bit more than what's required for sociology and other social sciences. This is simply because physics is a much older subject with a lot more history, this isn't meant as an attack on social sciences. The statement you quoted is not even close to an admission of pseudoscience in physics.
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    It is exactly an ad hominem. The author literally states that the demarcation function in physics is dependent on their opinion of the person making the claim.
    - Analog24 10y ago
      >...demarcation function... You're grasping at straws here. This is a blog post, not a publication in a peer reviewed journal. Furthermore, it is fairly easy for a physicist to form a reasonable "opinion" about someones grasp of theoretical physics. This "demarcation function" does not extend to any other aspects of ones opinions regardless of how much you want to force this meaning on her words.
      - 10y ago
emmelaich 10y ago
I think there is a place for speculation in science as long it is clearly understood as such. There used to be journal for it; it was fun reading. Speculations in Science and Technology http://link.springer.com/journal/volumesAndIssues/11216 http://link.springer.com/journal/volumesAndIssues/11216 It only ran for two years, 1997-1998.
bigger_cheese 10y ago
"Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in engineering or a related industry ... 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." This matches my experience. During the final year of my Engineering degree I decided to take a third year particle physics elective because it sounded interesting. The course had no pre-requisites but it probably should have. I remember showing up to the first lecture and being one of the only non-science students in the theatre. The lecturer started talking about Hamiltonian's, Fermi-Dirac Statistics and Wave-Functions and it all just went completely over my head. There was a whole bunch of "foreign" concepts that were assumed. I ended up needing to check out a bunch of physics texts from the library and over the next few weeks I had to teach myself the 2+ years of physics knowledge the rest of the class was familiar with. I passed the course but it was a lot of work for what was supposed to be an elective.
dredmorbius 10y ago
This raises any number of points and questions. How effectively can we communicate (and pass on to new generations) complex ideas at all? There's an essay on mathematics PhDs, noting that in any given seminar of a half-dozen or so people, you may well have the only six people in the world who can even understand the topic in the room. What does it mean to "know" something if only one billionth of the global population can even grasp it? There's the question of how to assess the quality of knowledge within a field. How can laypeople, inlcuding the politicians, voters, and taxpayers who ultimately pay for research, education, and otherwise support many of these operations, even assess what it is they're paying for and receiving? There's the matter of media quality and access. I make absolutely no bones that I'm a book thief, and praise Alexandra Elbakyan daily (along with Kale Brewster of the Internet Archive, Reddit's /r/scholar and BookZZ.org) for providing access to the raw materials of my own research. (Also various libraries, though they're far less convenient or accessible.) Information is a public good. It has massive positive externalities, it's nonrivalrous, and it needs to be disseminated and accessible in order to be useful. And yet we lock it away. Which is among the reasons why autodidacts rely on such poor alternatives as the popular press. Blaming journalists for poor descriptions of scientific concepts doesn't fly when it's scientists themselves who are kicking out these concepts. OK, to paraphrase other unfortunate social slogans, not all scientists. But many. And yes, reporters and editors should absolutely be called to task for sloppy writing and whitewashing crud. (Ah. I'm remembering a panel, Christopher Hitchens was among the presenters, where a female writer mentioned her experience writing for a fashion magazine on social topics -- the original work was hers, but after it had been washed through many more hands, it was anything but. I think in here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fkLX58ZWbWw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fkLX58ZWbWw Sorry, that's a 2 hour video, I'll see if I can't narrow down the timeframe. Probably Katha Pollitt. The relevant comments concern writing for Glamour, and occur at 14m30s.) And finally, as I've raised the issue with @schoen below, there's the question of how best to filter out the sensible cranks from the nuts. Finding good new ideas amongst the many bad ones, and sorting out how to keep from having to relitigate bullshit, is a Very Hard Problem.
fritzo 10y ago
I wish there were services for this in other areas. I'd pay to ask embarrassingly naive questions in fields where my knowledge-to-interest level is near zero, and where reading the internet has proven ineffective.
paulcole 10y ago
The comments here are full of people who should be paying $50 for 20 minutes of a physicist's time. Maybe we should start taking up a collection and seeing if we can get a bulk discount.
Yenrabbit 10y ago
Semi-relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1486/ http://xkcd.com/1486/
dandare 10y ago
>My clients almost exclusively get their information from the popular science media. Often, they get something utterly wrong in the process. Once I hear their reading of an article about, say, space-time foam or black hole firewalls, I can see where their misunderstanding stems from. But they come up with interpretations that never would have crossed my mind when writing an article. Can you see the parallel with democracy? Autodidacts can not really harm the field of physics no matter how naively wrong they are. But we have voting rights and we believe we understand the complex issues in sociology, justice, economics ... I am depressed.
evanwolf 10y ago
Heh. What I learned as a product manager by watching 100 hours of Hallmark movies. https://medium.com/product-hospice/100-hours-of-hallmark-movies-product-management-lessons-ddc1fca9d3e5 https://medium.com/product-hospice/100-hours-of-hallmark-mov...
TylerH 10y ago
"None of us makes good money" $150 an hour is very good money, especially if you have interested parties sending e-mails that are "piling up" in your inbox. Get outta here with that nonsense.

563 points by tbrownaw 10y ago

drauh 10y ago

I've had my share trying to convince someone that a perpetual motion system they described did not conserve energy or momentum. They refused to believe my assertion that momentum and energy were conserved quantities.

_polymer_ 10y ago
But what if you were paid to convince them?
- drauh 10y ago
  It was a long forum discussion, and well over a dozen engineers, mathematicians, and physicists kept saying the same thing. Some wrong long (>500 word) posts. We were all ignored. This person was invested in the idea that they had an insight that centuries' worth of work had overlooked.

jxy 10y ago

It is a good form of communicating sciences. Seriously, more professors should do it as their contributions to community. Perhaps starting from more reddit AMA?

johan_larson 10y ago
That's a big ask. Scholars tend to be rewarded for their contributions to advancing the field itself, not for improving relations with outsiders. Heck, these people can barely be bothered to deal with undergrads, never mind the general public. And really, they have little to gain from doing so. The general citizenry doesn't judge research output (publishing), and they don't directly provide the means of carrying it out (funding), so any attention directed their way is basically a waste for working scholars.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  It is a big ask as you say, but failing to do so is costing science the trust of the lay public. A public that doesn't understand science will vote to burn all the oil, give measles to all the children, and try to mine the moon for cheese.
  - thansharp 10y ago
    Tragedy of the commons. It definitely benefits everyone if some people stood up, but it's in no one's specific personal interests to be at a comparative disadvantage due to this.
- rjsw 10y ago
  Charles Simonyi has funded the post of Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University [1]. There are a few other similar posts elsewhere. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simonyi_Professor_for_the_Public_Understanding_of_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simonyi_Professor_for_the_Publ...
mkehrt 10y ago
Check out /r/askhistorians, if you aren't familiar with it.

Analemma_ 10y ago

This is a fun article, and also a useful reminder that although Hacker News tends to mythologize autodidacts, the boring reality is that in disciplines other than programming, the overwhelming majority of them are useless cranks.

pdkl95 10y ago
> the overwhelming majority of them are useless cranks I think you missed the point of the article. Most of these "cranks" are people trying to learn. They are excited about science and are trying to reconcile the bits of knowledge they have been able to accumulate from often-terrible sources (poor quality education system[1], mass media, "science journalism" that leaves out the science). Carl Sagan discusses this type of person in the beginning "The Demon Haunted World", where he talks about a cab driver who was really excited to meet "that scientist guy" (Sagan). The cab diver's excitement faded quickly when Sagan's answers about his pseudo-scientific questions tended to be "sorry, that doesn't exist". Sagan also observed that the cab driver was almost completely ignorant of the actual discoveries of modern science. "[He] had heard virtually nothing of modern science. He had a natural appetite for the wonders of the Universe. He wanted to know about science. It's just that all the science had gotten filtered out before it reached him. Our cultural motifs, or educational system, our communications media had failed this man. What the society permitted to trickle through was mainly pretense and confusion. It had never taught him how to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation. He knew nothing about how science works."[2] I commend Sabine Hossenfelder for finding a creative way to approach the difficult task of teaching people even when they seem like a "crank". This is important work because a successful democracy depends on the people having sufficient education. Instead of calling people "cranks", try to see things from their point of view and try to point them on a proper path towards a proper understanding science. Ignoring or insulting "cranks" leaves them isolated and ignorant; teaching them how to use a "baloney detection kit"[3] and maybe their enthusiasm can be reorientated to real science. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-... [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=Yz8Y6KfXf9UC&pg=PT22 https://books.google.com/books?id=Yz8Y6KfXf9UC&pg=PT22 [3] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Fine_Art_of_Baloney_Detection http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Fine_Art_of_Baloney_Detecti...

erroneousfunk 10y ago

I'm hardly a physicist, but I have a degree in "general engineering" (long story about how I managed to escape specialization there) and a master's in software engineering, and I've taken a few advanced math courses, including partial differential equations, computational theory, scientific computing, and a math-heavy course on relativity. I also spent a year and a half working for a Harvard physics professor, alongside his team of grad students. So, while I can't "do physics" I think I know enough to understand a little about what it takes to _be_ a physicist, and appreciate the work that they do. My husband and I were listening to a radio program (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a-little-bit-of-knowledge http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a...) about a man convinced that he had found a mistake in Einstein's theory of relativity, and trying to communicate this idea to a physicist (futilely, obviously). My husband, who was a music major for a year before dropping out of college, and I started getting in an argument about this episode that was so heated, I felt like we were listening to two completely different stories! I kept insisting that the advanced math and education wasn't just some funsies shibboleth the physicists had to keep the hoi polloi out of physics -- the devil's in the details and the man in the story didn't even understand the big picture correctly. My husband was angry and insulted that the physicist dismissed the man's theory out of hand, and felt that anyone could make a contribution to physics with perhaps a little help from a calculus book -- just look at history! I thought the hero of the story (if there was one) was clearly the physicist, while my husband was solidly on the side of the electrician with a little learning, trying dangerous things. I was really shocked. We don't usually fight like that, and especially over something so seemingly trivial, but, in retrospect, I thought that it displayed huge tension in society as a whole, between academics and non-academics. We hear so much about the "one percent" and income-based class distinctions, but relatively little about academic barriers in society, whether real or artificially imposed. Should physics open up in a real way (not just "pop science" articles and occasional books for laymen)? Should we put a stronger "academic" focus in early public and high school education? Should we provide more resources for "physicists who just need a little help with the math" whether they're right or wrong? Although I was staunchly in favor of the hallowed halls of academe, and it still holds a special place in my heart, I suspect that the correct solution lies somewhere in the middle. Anyway, fantastic article, and it really brings up an important point that is too seldom addressed, by physicists, or society as a whole!

angrow 10y ago

If we need a more neutral term than "crank", rather than "autodidact," why not "outsider"? An outsider artist is anyone who creates art not easily dismissed, despite not participating in the social and academic communities of their medium, so why can't there be outsider scientists and engineers as well?

Analog24 10y ago
There is a big difference here. In physics, the "outsiders" are easily dismissed. It's just that the outsiders themselves usually don't accept that they're just flat out wrong and convince themselves that it's the establishment working against them.
- Kinnard 10y ago
  Haven't many outsiders become insiders? Or really even . . . beatified? I recall some famous scientists being forced to recant and being . . . completely right. I additionally wouldn't by the argument that the scientific community was on his side. The "community in power" was not on his side. And that's what matters.
  - tdb7893 10y ago
    The vast majority of those situations are where the people are already scientists and experts in their field. We are talking about people who are not experts in physics.

epistasis 10y ago

>My clients almost exclusively get their information from the popular science media. Often, they get something utterly wrong in the process. Once I hear their reading of an article about, say, space-time foam or black hole firewalls, I can see where their misunderstanding stems from. But they come up with interpretations that never would have crossed my mind when writing an article. This isn't just physics articles, and isn't just cranks. Most of the popular reporting on science gets things very wrong. I can't say whether physics is more correct or less correct, but I think I notice less eye-rolling and complaints from physicists about popular news articles than I do from other fields. Something to keep in mind for people that are getting their science news from the media.

Analog24 10y ago
As a (former) physicist I have to say that there is plenty of eye-rolling about how physics is portrayed in the news. However, in any branch of modern physics it is accepted that no news article aimed at the general public could ever possibly convey the science with complete accuracy. Simply because it requires years of study and specialization to really understand it. I did my graduate research at the LHC and I was there when the Higgs boson was discovered. I can't tell you how many people (non physicists) came to me with questions about it that were completely misguided because of it's misrepresentation in the news ("God particle" - holy mother of terrible catch phrases). But at the same time how can anyone expect to convey the full scope of the Standard Model in a news article? The problem isn't that simplifying science with nice metaphors and analogies is wrong, it's that people who read the articles don't understand that what they're reading is just that: a nice metaphor or analogy. People think that because the science is dumbed down for a general audience that it must be simple enough for a general audience to understand. Unfortunately, that has not been the case in physics (and most other fields) for over a hundred years and never will be again.
- th0ma5 10y ago
  Often I wish articles were written targeting a person with an undergrad or grad degree in physics rather than the typical 6th grade reading level. If people don't understand stuff they can google it or just not read the article.

rupellohn 10y ago

I recommend 'Physics on the Fringe' for anyone interested in this topic http://physicsonthefringe.com/page/about-book http://physicsonthefringe.com/page/about-book

erdevs 10y ago

I wonder if this is changing with things like online education and the wealth of real information and in-depth knowledge on the internet. It seems self-teaching is much, much more viable today and I imagine that younger generations of autodidacts might not be so ill-informed on the whole.

Noseshine 10y ago
I have taken about 70 courses by now - about 1/3 of them "hard", the rest more like "Nutrition for Horses", on edX and Coursera mostly. From the courses currently offered on the major course sites it seems they limit themselves to courses taught during the first two years of college - and many courses are dumbed-down to a "general public" level. There are a few exceptions, for example the quantum mechanics courses on edX, but they really are exceptions. You can get more demanding courses on the university learning websites themselves, for example https://lagunita.stanford.edu/ https://lagunita.stanford.edu/ for Stanford. The breadth of the courses and course-takers is focused on the basics though. That doesn't mean it's all easy and dumbed-down - a course like "Medical Neuroscience" on Coursera (excellent, by the way, the professor is a wonderful teacher - https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience) have a workload of >15 hours/week. It still is "only" an introductory course though. I think you can sure get the basics via online education, and that means "university level basics". The main problem I see with more advanced courses is that you need to test your level of understanding and have it challenged on a high level, way more than is good for an online course. That's because those tests, if they are any good, is going to show you the huge gaping holes you still have in your knowledge, and for an online course that's too discouraging.
- kaybe 10y ago
  These tests are also really really hard to do automatically. The usual way here during education is to get a worksheet parallelly to the lecture every week, work through the problems and hand them in for correction and grading. If it's easy, the solution and correction are straight-forward. But if it's hard, as, say, some mathematical proof, sometimes a lot of knowledge and work goes into determining the correctness of the solution. And these are the problems that I feel changed the structure of my mind over the years. And then, even if things are easy to determine right or wrong, as for a coding assignment, people still profit immensely from getting good feedback on their work, from qualified people (and not peer-grading like online courses occasionally do).

schoen 10y ago

I get the e-mail for the EFF Cooperative Computing Awards https://www.eff.org/awards/coop https://www.eff.org/awards/coop so, despite having put lots of effort into not having people make spurious claims, I hear from a whole lot of math cranks. Two things that I find striking are many people's level of confidence that they can personally "solve the problem" (in this case, by inventing some kind of "formula for primes" that has eluded the organized mathematics world for decades), and many people's lack of understanding of what a solution would consist of (in terms of knowing that mathematical proofs exist, and being able to understand whether they have a theorem or just a conjecture). Our situation is especially tricky because we chose a problem that experts said would require lots of computational resources and couldn't be solved by new mathematical insight, but then we didn't outright forbid people from trying to solve it by insight. So a lot of people see an exciting challenge, like "they think it will take a lot of computer time, but if I can just see the pattern, I can skip all of that!". Also, we have a large monetary reward for solutions and so people are excited by the idea that they have them and are about to receive a bunch of money. I think it's true that many of the people who contact me about this are excited about mathematics in the way that people who contacted Dr. Hossenfelder were excited about physics (and, as pdkl95 said, that Carl Sagan's cab driver was excited about science). But it's still frustrating that, after we've gone to some lengths to say that you need a proof and not just a guess, and that decades of research indicate that you can't find primes of this size without significant computer time, people are still so confident that their guesses are right and so resistant to accepting that they haven't met the awards criteria. It would be interesting to see an equivalent service for talking to mathematicians and to see what some of the people who contact us might get out of it, and whether it might inspire them to pursue more constructive things. (I always wish that our awards would motivate someone to start doing Project Euler problems or something...) If someone set up that "talk to a mathematician" service, I would probably try to send lots of people their way.

drauh 10y ago
Oh god. "Formula for primes" - I was involved in a way too long forum discussion where everyone involved was trying to convince the guy putting forth his idea for generating primes that he was merely going round in circles, proving and reproving identities. As a former physicist, I think that math is way harder to talk about to laypeople, though there can be a wide variation in difficulty by subfield. Maybe number theory can be accessible, but analysis, say, would be pretty opaque. Not to mention some of the more exotic branches of math.

forgotpwtomain 10y ago

> 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. So generally for sciences (and for compsci cranks as well) we have a direct answer because either your theories can be experimentally verified or they cannot. This is normally a solid position but it puts for example the decades of work on string theory in a bind - since they haven't produced a single verifiable result either. So the author offers a tangential and more broadly encompassing but subjectively experiential position: > 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. Sure, that's great you've verified membership in a social group - but that's really insufficient when you are trying to identify crank science. This sentence can also be applied to all kinds of cults and secular belief systems, hell, I think most of academic humanities fall under this as well. Anecdotal - I know someone who is a well accomplished researcher in their respective experimental physics field (with numerous citations), as a hobby they also happen to have an interest in theoretical physics, where they have published several papers entirely to no response (which to my understanding would be pretty awesome of they were not incorrect) . So it's not just in and out of 'professional physics', the number of people specializing in a particular area can be very small and closed off in an even more domain particular kind of way.

deleted 10y ago
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selimthegrim 10y ago
If you read many many scientific articles for a living, you can begin to tell from the writing style whether this is a crank or not.

ARothfusz 10y ago

This is exactly developer support for "open source" physics.

sevenless 10y ago

Seems to bear comparison to phone sex lines, in that you're satisfying a basic human need - in this case, to be listened to. John Baez keeps a 'Crackpot Index' score at http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

Animats 10y ago
"50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions." Unfortunately, that describes string theory, as Smolin keeps pointing out.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  Depending on your view, that might not be especially unfortunate. (String theory is, IMO, solidly a crackpot hypothesis until they start using the scientific method.)
- mathgenius 10y ago
  Do you know what Witten has said in response to this criticism? That string theory predicts gravity. :-)
  - selimthegrim 10y ago
    I like how apparently everyone dismisses string theory predicting Bethe Ansatz results as immaterial largely because no one outside of condensed matter and some math people bothers learning about BA.

Xcelerate 10y ago

Whenever I talk about physics (to non-scientists), I notice that people have a tendency to start veering away from the math and onto irrelevant metaphysical tangents. For instance, I'll be trying to explain the history of renormalization in quantum field theory, and someone will suggest, "Well maybe we don't really understand infinity". No, we understand "infinity" just fine. It's a concept that's clearly defined using a set of axioms that have been around for thousands of years. "Well maybe the mathematicians are wrong." I start losing my patience pretty quickly at this point. The other big one that annoys me is "Well it's just a theory". Sure, and gravity is just a theory too. If you doubt it, you're free to go skydiving without a parachute, but personally, I'm not taking any chances.

mindcrime 10y ago
someone will suggest, "Well maybe we don't really understand infinity". No, we understand "infinity" just fine. It's a concept that's clearly defined using a set of axioms that have been around for thousands of years. I am not a mathematician, but my understanding is that a considerable amount of research into how to properly address /use infinity in math was ongoing as recently as the early 20th century. Not that I disagree with your overall point though.
- lasfter 10y ago
  The issue is that there are different infinities. The infinity the parent is talking about, the one that you generally run into in calculus class and the like, is straightforward. The research in the past century was about what happens _past_ infinity, e.g. ordinal numbers. I'm no mathematician either, so I'll stop there before I embarrass myself. The most accessible resource I found was this VSauce video [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrU9YDoXE88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrU9YDoXE88
  - mindcrime 10y ago
    That was a very interesting video, thanks for sharing. Now I'm going to be addicted to VSauce...

mindcrime 10y ago

Some of these folks could probably benefit from reading a book that I just bought: The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need To Know To Start Doing Physics. https://www.amazon.com/Theoretical-Minimum-Start-Doing-Physics/dp/0465075681 https://www.amazon.com/Theoretical-Minimum-Start-Doing-Physi... It's a cool book... written to be relatively accessible, but is actually grounded in the real principles and math used in physics. As somebody who considers himself an autodidact of sorts (in that I'm as much self-taught as formally educated), but who has some awareness of "what I don't know" (and therefore doesn't sit around coming up with crackpot theories about quantum mechanics and what-not), I love this kind of stuff. One of the authors is Leonard Susskind who is pretty credible. This is a book that is serious, but succinct (as you might guess from the title). Note that there is also a companion volume that is specifically about Quantum Mechanics. https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Theoretical-Leonard-Susskind/dp/0465062903/ https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Theoretical-Leonard... All of that said, I do think it's important to note (as others already have) that "autodidact != crank". Plenty of autodidacts are just people who study physics (or whatever) because they find it interesting, but they are aware of their limitations and don't pretend to have amazing new insights that have escaped physics for decades, etc. Likewise I'm pretty sure you can find cranks who have a formal education as well.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Dr_Jefyll 10y ago
> autodidact != crank This. Unless you consider Charles Darwin, Oliver Heaviside, James Watt and Thomas Edison cranks. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, as you can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts
- j2kun 10y ago
  That being said, there are cranks on that list.
Aelinsaar 10y ago

keithpeter 10y ago

"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." Any chance of on-boarding via experimental work/data analysis in some way like in Astronomy? http://www.iau.org/public/themes/citizen-science-projects/ http://www.iau.org/public/themes/citizen-science-projects/

mrcactu5 10y ago

Many base their theories on images, downloaded or drawn by hand, embedded in long pamphlets. A few use basic equations. Some add videos or applets. Some work with 3D models of Styrofoam, cardboard or wires. Actually these are perfectly good ways of communicating ideas and solving problems.

rsp1984 10y ago
Yes, apart from the long pamphlets.
Analog24 10y ago
I don't think the author is suggesting that diagrams and visualizations are inherently bad. In fact, the vast majority of physics is done with help of diagrams. Even modern particle physics (Feynman diagrams). I believe the author is pointing out that a lot of people see a cartoon diagram in a news article and treat it like a scaled blueprint of the theory/concept.

panglott 10y ago

This strikes me more as a success of science journalism (people are inspired to improve their understanding of physics) and a failure of science education (intelligent, motivated amateurs receive no support outside of formal education). Along these lines, is there a good recommended contemporary popular work on quantum physics for non-physicists?

ivan_ah 10y ago
The "mechanics" of QM is linear algebra, so you should get a good base in LA before looking into QM. My upcoming book on LA has chapter on QM, specifically "matrix" quantum mechanics, which is the subset of quantum physics phenomena that can be represented using finite-dimensional vectors, matrices, projections, etc. For the full "physicsy" QM course, you'll need to learn about the wave function formalism, which is a bit more complicated...
Ono-Sendai 10y ago
I am considering writing a blog post series on 'Quantum physics for programmers', would you find that interesting?

pklausler 10y ago

A very long time ago, I worked for Seymour Cray. He received a surprising amount of crank mail (and back then, it was real postal mail, not e-mail). His secretary filtered out the crank mail, spared him from it, and was good enough to pass the best stuff on to some of the engineers that would appreciate it. I still have some of it, including a long treatise from an inmate at the county jail who had a theory of interplanetary transportation involving kangaroos whose energy output would be measured in "gigahops". EDIT: two minor typos

sevensor 10y ago
I'm tremendously amused by the kangaroo theory!
- pklausler 10y ago
  I suppose that we'd be talking about "exahops" today.
- 77pt77 10y ago
  Better than turtles I suppose.
DigitalPhysics 10y ago
1.21 GigaHops!? 1.21 GigaHops!!?!

atemerev 10y ago

This guy have secured himself so much good karma. Wow. Thank you, from all us autodidacts. (I am trying to learn some astrophysics as a hobby. Amateur science is currently mostly frowned upon).

whorleater 10y ago
I wouldn't say amateur science is frowned upon, more than a lack of proper foundation can lead you astray pretty quickly, which is why most "amateurs" manage to convince themselves of some big metaphysical truth. The learning of science is heavily encouraged, but it should definitely be done through proper means.
neogodless 10y ago
(girl)
- atemerev 10y ago
  Whoops. My fault. I thought I checked it. I didn't.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
brohee 10y ago
Astronomy is actually the field where amateurs make the most useful contributions, and amateurs/pro collaborations are actually a thing. Close enough to astrophysics?

j2kun 10y ago

> 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? Just the other day I went to a talk by a prestigious physicist who, on top of telling only half-truths _at best_, made all of these mistakes and more. And the audience ate it up! As a mathematician and guy-who-writes-about-math-online, it makes me feel very frustrated. I also realized the difference between a physicist and a mathematician: a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the truth for the sake of press, while a mathematician sticks to the truth and as a result nobody cares.

martincmartin 10y ago
a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the truth for the sake of press, while a mathematician sticks to the truth and as a result nobody cares. I think it goes deeper than this. I was in the same undergraduate mathematics and physics classes as Nima Arkani-Hamed[1]. In calculus class, we learned very formal, epsilon-delta calculus (from Spivak's textbook). In physics, we learned from Feynman's Lectures on Physics. Years later I went to lunch with him, and he mentioned that he spent much of his time fighting the formalist instincts from our Calculus class, and thinking more intuitively about mathematics. I do think physicists play more fast-and-loose with mathematics, e.g. using approximations like a few terms from a Taylor series, or other assumptions. When talking to the public, I can see how that would turn into playing fast-and-loose with the facts in order to "project" their knowledge into the space spanned by laypeople's knowledge, even if that projection loses important aspects of the work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nima_Arkani-Hamed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nima_Arkani-Hamed
- 10y ago

lifeisstillgood 10y ago

This is an awesome example of real down in the dirt science communication. I'm impressed

martincmartin 10y ago

There are many people who decide not to go into research but enter industry instead. Some of them don't have the intellectual chops, but others are turned off by the politics, long hours that professors work, spending more time writing grant proposals and managing students than doing research, etc. Some of them have spare time, or maybe will have spare time after their kids are grown, or will be able to retire early. Then they could become citizen scientists [1], independent scientists [2], etc. I wonder how to organize and encourage them? How to redirect or weed out the cranks, and encourage those who are motivated and can look at things from a new perspective? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist

j2kun 10y ago
I like this idea, but how much time would be spent re-teaching the citizen scientists the prerequisites needed to do research? Since most of the knowledge at the forefront of research is in papers and not books, that seems like the biggest hurdle.
- cbHXBY1D 10y ago
  It would be up to the citizen scientist to keep up with newly published papers. I think it would be interesting to create an environment that encourages the hobby scientist to follow the forefront of research. Maybe something like the Recurse Center but for maths and physics. I'm not sure where the funding would come from since the Recurse Center seems to make money from corporate recruiting. Maybe universities?
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    Nothing's stopping them even now (at least in most theoretical sciences). Almost all books and papers are freely if not always legally available in the internet. If they discover something they can write up a paper and submit it to an appropriate journal.
- 10y ago

martincmartin 10y ago

Einstein famously couldn't find a teaching position after graduation, spent 2 years unemployed, then worked as a patent clerk in a patent office. According to wikipedia: "Much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time." So there's two lessons here, I think: 1. People outside academia can still make important contributions, and 2. spending a lot of time thinking about other people's proposals, separating the good from the bad, and inspire a new, fruitful way of looking at things, or at least overcoming standard mental traps.

noahlt 10y ago
Keep in mind that Einstein still went to grad school for physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kleiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kleiner

api 10y ago

I've been fascinated for a long time by just how much effective autodidactism there is in software vs. other fields. There are tons of people who have made major contributions here that are completely self-taught. Software is uniquely suited to autodidactism for three reasons: (1) The tools are easy to obtain and easy to start using. Capital cost is low to non-existent. (2) The learning feedback loop is nearly instantaneous and the results are almost always perfectly objective. Things either work or they don't. There is not much room for delusional or wishful thinking. (3) Resources for learning are readily available and are mostly written in a style that is utilitarian and straightforward rather than cliquish and arcane. Theoretical physics passes on point #1 until you hit the need to do serious experimentation, but it fails on points #2 and #3. There is no command prompt that will tell you in 10ms if a theory is at least rational and internally consistent, and advanced mathematics has an arcane symbology and jargon that seems almost intentionally designed to resist penetration by those outside the academic circles where it is used and taught.

fritzo 10y ago
I think (2) is the crux. You can deceive yourself about your completeness of understanding, but you can't implement an idea in code until you understand (or are at least aware of) a complete set of components.

netcan 10y ago

This is a fun idea for a service. I happened to read 3 articles this week on labour productivity. My economics is undergraduate level with 15 years of rust, but I had an idea. I thought I was brilliant for the rest of the day. But, I'd like to know if my idea is an existing theorem, wrong for some reason I don't understand or (most likely) a novel, brilliant idea that economists just overlooked. Dunno if I'd pay $50 to find out. 34.99 tops, maybe. :)

morgante 10y ago
At the very least, you should write it up and post it. There are some people with more direct economics knowledge on HN.

dekhn 10y ago

While I agree with plenty the author wrote, I have seen plenty of people who are great with math, can speak the language, know how to promote their results in pubs and conferences, and yet are still completely and totally wrong. My best example is a smart physics graduate that I went to grad school (in biophysics) with. An open problem at the time was how motor proteins couple the energy in ATP hydrolosis to directed motion. I said one day, "hmm, maybe it works like this..." and she said, "oh no, my advisor and I proved that mechanism was impossible." A few years go by, we're getting ready to graduate. I ask her, "so, since you spent the last 7 years studying motor proteins, how do they work?" And she told me it was the mechanism I had proposed. I said, "but you disproved that!". And she said, "well, then I collected data, and it turns out our assumptions are wrong." I constantly end up arguing with quantitative people in my own old field- for example, I used to argue with people who did GWAS, they insisted all their stats were great and perfect, then Ionnides and others showed their stats were abysmal, and they were massively overconfident in their results. This is not to say all the cranks are right- they are almost certainly wrong. Anybody who attempts to get around the second law of thermodynamics is going to lose, unless there is something truly and fundamentally wrong with statistical mechanics.

hardlianotion 10y ago

The bit that I take from this is a scientist who is taking on a mission to explain himself fully, to people who make an effort and give a damn. Very easy to call people like this cranks, and rather hard to make something positive come out of the engagement in many cases. I suspect the fact that money is involved goes some way to making this initiative a success.

lcvella 10y ago

That is why I believe society is not getting what it is paying for in physics and mathematics. Too much of the funds invested in physics knowledge is from taxpayers money, and all the knowledge produced is useless if we can't get it back and, with due dedication, understand it. I always felt most of the modern physics knowledge is completely inaccessible to me. The latest physics book I could read and understand was one by Einstein himself, "Relativity: The Special and General Theory", which is 100 years old. When I tackled to learn quantum mechanics, I couldn't find good accessible (cost-wise) material, and the supposedly good book appointed by a physicist friend of mine cost more than $100 on Amazon (which is about 1/3 of the minimum wage of where country I live). I end up buying the Indian print of the book much cheaper. But there was no chance I could read it at the time, because of my lack of calculus basis, what made me watch the entire Udacity course on differential equations. Thanks to that, I had the bare minimum to be accepted in a PhD program on mechanical engineering (I am MSc on Computer Science) to work on computational fluid dynamics. Now, halfway through an engineering PhD, I believe am (more) able to tackle the QM book (look all that took me!) That is why I deeply value the effort of Udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy and such, because without real efforts to bring actual knowledge to public, in an accessible way (both cost and didactic-wise), modern physics and mathematics are a waste of money on private clubs.

77pt77 10y ago
> I always felt most of the modern physics knowledge is completely inaccessible to me. Maybe you are just intellectually inadequate. I'm inadequate to run the 100m in less than 15s or even to finish a marathon in less than 2h. Doesn't mean these things are generally inaccessible.
- gsteinb88 10y ago
  Well, the entire human race is inadequate to run a marathon in less than 2h so far...
  - 77pt77 10y ago
    You're absolutely right, that was a typo. I meant 3 hours. I don't think I could finish in less than a day at all...

jsprogrammer 10y ago

>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. Sorry, but this is an admission of pseudoscience. All apparently in the name of committing an ad hominem. It is commendable that the author is helping others to get answers to their questions, but this article indicates that there are substantial issues to be dealt with.

Analog24 10y ago
Although it is a bit of a jab, I wouldn't call it an ad hominem. And this is no way an admission of pseudoscience. She is simply saying that in physics it's (usually) easy to tell when someone doesn't know what they're talking about. Mainly because the amount of prerequisite material needed to understand and contribute to cutting edge physics is likely quite a bit more than what's required for sociology and other social sciences. This is simply because physics is a much older subject with a lot more history, this isn't meant as an attack on social sciences. The statement you quoted is not even close to an admission of pseudoscience in physics.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  It is exactly an ad hominem. The author literally states that the demarcation function in physics is dependent on their opinion of the person making the claim.
  - Analog24 10y ago
    >...demarcation function... You're grasping at straws here. This is a blog post, not a publication in a peer reviewed journal. Furthermore, it is fairly easy for a physicist to form a reasonable "opinion" about someones grasp of theoretical physics. This "demarcation function" does not extend to any other aspects of ones opinions regardless of how much you want to force this meaning on her words.
    - 10y ago

emmelaich 10y ago

I think there is a place for speculation in science as long it is clearly understood as such. There used to be journal for it; it was fun reading. Speculations in Science and Technology http://link.springer.com/journal/volumesAndIssues/11216 http://link.springer.com/journal/volumesAndIssues/11216 It only ran for two years, 1997-1998.

bigger_cheese 10y ago

"Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in engineering or a related industry ... 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." This matches my experience. During the final year of my Engineering degree I decided to take a third year particle physics elective because it sounded interesting. The course had no pre-requisites but it probably should have. I remember showing up to the first lecture and being one of the only non-science students in the theatre. The lecturer started talking about Hamiltonian's, Fermi-Dirac Statistics and Wave-Functions and it all just went completely over my head. There was a whole bunch of "foreign" concepts that were assumed. I ended up needing to check out a bunch of physics texts from the library and over the next few weeks I had to teach myself the 2+ years of physics knowledge the rest of the class was familiar with. I passed the course but it was a lot of work for what was supposed to be an elective.

dredmorbius 10y ago

This raises any number of points and questions. How effectively can we communicate (and pass on to new generations) complex ideas at all? There's an essay on mathematics PhDs, noting that in any given seminar of a half-dozen or so people, you may well have the only six people in the world who can even understand the topic in the room. What does it mean to "know" something if only one billionth of the global population can even grasp it? There's the question of how to assess the quality of knowledge within a field. How can laypeople, inlcuding the politicians, voters, and taxpayers who ultimately pay for research, education, and otherwise support many of these operations, even assess what it is they're paying for and receiving? There's the matter of media quality and access. I make absolutely no bones that I'm a book thief, and praise Alexandra Elbakyan daily (along with Kale Brewster of the Internet Archive, Reddit's /r/scholar and BookZZ.org) for providing access to the raw materials of my own research. (Also various libraries, though they're far less convenient or accessible.) Information is a public good. It has massive positive externalities, it's nonrivalrous, and it needs to be disseminated and accessible in order to be useful. And yet we lock it away. Which is among the reasons why autodidacts rely on such poor alternatives as the popular press. Blaming journalists for poor descriptions of scientific concepts doesn't fly when it's scientists themselves who are kicking out these concepts. OK, to paraphrase other unfortunate social slogans, not all scientists. But many. And yes, reporters and editors should absolutely be called to task for sloppy writing and whitewashing crud. (Ah. I'm remembering a panel, Christopher Hitchens was among the presenters, where a female writer mentioned her experience writing for a fashion magazine on social topics -- the original work was hers, but after it had been washed through many more hands, it was anything but. I think in here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fkLX58ZWbWw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fkLX58ZWbWw Sorry, that's a 2 hour video, I'll see if I can't narrow down the timeframe. Probably Katha Pollitt. The relevant comments concern writing for Glamour, and occur at 14m30s.) And finally, as I've raised the issue with @schoen below, there's the question of how best to filter out the sensible cranks from the nuts. Finding good new ideas amongst the many bad ones, and sorting out how to keep from having to relitigate bullshit, is a Very Hard Problem.

fritzo 10y ago

I wish there were services for this in other areas. I'd pay to ask embarrassingly naive questions in fields where my knowledge-to-interest level is near zero, and where reading the internet has proven ineffective.

paulcole 10y ago

The comments here are full of people who should be paying $50 for 20 minutes of a physicist's time. Maybe we should start taking up a collection and seeing if we can get a bulk discount.

Yenrabbit 10y ago

Semi-relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1486/ http://xkcd.com/1486/

dandare 10y ago

>My clients almost exclusively get their information from the popular science media. Often, they get something utterly wrong in the process. Once I hear their reading of an article about, say, space-time foam or black hole firewalls, I can see where their misunderstanding stems from. But they come up with interpretations that never would have crossed my mind when writing an article. Can you see the parallel with democracy? Autodidacts can not really harm the field of physics no matter how naively wrong they are. But we have voting rights and we believe we understand the complex issues in sociology, justice, economics ... I am depressed.

evanwolf 10y ago

Heh. What I learned as a product manager by watching 100 hours of Hallmark movies. https://medium.com/product-hospice/100-hours-of-hallmark-movies-product-management-lessons-ddc1fca9d3e5 https://medium.com/product-hospice/100-hours-of-hallmark-mov...

TylerH 10y ago

"None of us makes good money" $150 an hour is very good money, especially if you have interested parties sending e-mails that are "piling up" in your inbox. Get outta here with that nonsense.