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There has always been a dichotomy between those who understand the science, what it tries to explain, the limits on those explanations, and those who simply lat
by gacba 16y ago
There has always been a dichotomy between those who understand the science, what it tries to explain, the limits on those explanations, and those who simply latch on to the terminology out of convenience. What the Bleep Do We Know? was a terrible offender in the latter, although a fun exercise in mental masturbation nonetheless. Unfortunately, those who are in the latter camp will not (or cannot) understand the implications of this article...
- niels_olson 16y agoI must say, this article also strikes me as mental masturbation. He puts introduces concepts in a way that is academically very disjointed, but the juxtapositions might seem plausible to a casual reader of popular science books, eg, > The basic Schrodinger Equation which describes the electron in the hydrogen atom approximately (the electron is a spin 1/2 particle which is exactly described by the Dirac Equation) is <LaTeX of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation> Having studied quantum mechanics, I think, if anything, this article highlights why physicists occasionally state that no one understands quantum mechanics. The concepts simply cannot be adequately compressed into manageable English sentences, but the trained mind can genuinely operate on the problems using the symbolic language of math, then return to English to express the results. It's sort of like flipping from one programming language to another: they might all be Turing complete, but no one is implemented a sed VM in browsers. For that matter, I wonder if native speakers of highly iconographic languages like Chinese are able to approach such challenges.