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> ...the pure joy of understanding the universe around us is one of the most beautiful experiences you can ever have in life. But you do not need to study phys

by nyc111 8y ago

> ...the pure joy of understanding the universe around us is one of the most beautiful experiences you can ever have in life. But you do not need to study physics for 25 years in order to understand how the world works. Academic physics that she wants us to learn to undersdand the world is just a new academic subject invented or formalized in the 19. century. Archimedes knew 0 (zero) physics and made huge discoveries. Galileo was not a physicist in the modern sense of the word. Even Newton was not a physicist but a natural philosopher. Physics today is a professional field. By studying physics textbooks you will only gain enough knowledge to pass physics exams. It's much better to go out and look at nature directly. If you need specific mathematics just learn that part, solve your problem and move on. But academic physics, as she clearly mentions,claims to build on previous knowledge. This is the way of scholasticism. Scholastics claim that without spending two years studying calculus you cannot invert a matrix. (Because they make a living teaching you calculus.) This is not true. Knowledge is not linear. I can study and learn matrix operations with zero calculus knowledge. The opposite of scholasticism is just-in-time knowledge. Whatever I need I can look it up. But thanks for posting this. There are good resources in it.

FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago
A lot of times you don't know what you need. The point of a good curriculum is to help you avoid those situations as much as possible.
- nyc111 8y ago
  If the goal is to try to understand nature, make your own curriculum. Most people, myself included, initially believe the physics hype and believe that by studying academic physics they will gain new understanding of nature. I believe this is not the right way. It is better to start by asking a specific question. For instance, I am curious about what matter is. So I ask myself What is matter? and try to answer this question. I divide my question into smaller questions. Until I find a question easy enough to answer. I take it from there. But if I enter a physics curriculum in a university, I won't be able to ask this question for 20 years. The answer will always be in the future.
  - selimthegrim 8y ago
    When you want to learn and use the simple abstractions that are just the other side of complexity that generalize the problem you are working on and its solution, what do you do? Do you hope for one?
fjsolwmv 8y ago
Not sure why you were downvoted. I agree that the average popular person will get more out of physics doing things they can (re)discover themselves, like Archimedes work on bouyancy and Newton's work on optics. Too many folks are stuck in the read/cram/exam mentality from competitive schooling.
eigenspace 8y ago
> The opposite of scholasticism is just-in-time knowledge. Whatever I need I can look it up. I understand the temptation to think this way but I really disagree. Scholasticism has serious problems but the solution is not 'just-in-time knowledge'. Scholastacism has been such a successfull approach for physicists exactly because the human mind is simply not equipped to approach much of modern physics. The scholastic traditions are in place to augment and fix our inherent mental deficiencies and prepare us to be able to understand physics. Approaching physics is not a knowledge problem. Its an understanding problem and true understanding takes work, not informaation delivery.
BeetleB 8y ago
I think I appreciate the point you are making, but you have gone a little too far in making that point. I've gone through a physics education, and I can attest that one can learn the material, be good at taking exams, and still do a poor job of applying it to the real world. The other extreme is as problematic, though. Knowing certain formalism in mathematics can really help in expressing a physics principle - and at times it takes a fair amount of seemingly pointless formalism to get to that point. >Scholastics claim that without spending two years studying calculus you cannot invert a matrix. (Because they make a living teaching you calculus.) I have no idea where this is coming from. In my education, we were taught matrix inversion a full year before calculus. I've studied matrix inversion multiple times in my academic career, and I don't remember calculus being invoked once. And to be frank, I'd be extremely wary of anyone claiming strong physics knowledge without learning calculus. Physics gained by leaps and bounds after calculus was introduced. It is the subject one can apply calculus most easily to, and is perhaps the reason we know more physics than any other discipline out there.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  > wary of anyone claiming strong physics knowledge Well, that depends. Faraday was a great physicist (his claims, whatever they may have been, notwithstanding).
  - BeetleB 8y ago
    Are you suggesting that Faraday did not know calculus?
    - Koshkin 8y ago
      According to Wikipedia, "his mathematical abilities, however, did not extend as far as trigonometry and were limited to the simplest algebra."
- nyc111 8y ago
  > In my education, we were taught matrix inversion a full year before calculus. Thanks for correcting that. I need to find a better example. What I’m trying to say that is that, the academia or scholasticism teaches you a set curriculum. I think this is not the most productive way of learning. As an analogy, I don’t need to understand and memorize all the symbols of a programming language to write a program. I can have a basic understanding and then I can look up the rest as needed. Scholasticism doesn’t allow this.
Koshkin 8y ago
> But you do not need to study physics for 25 years in order to understand how the world works. True, that. But to each their own, and so everyone has a different requirement as to the depth of such knowledge to be considered an understanding. A squirrel knows enough about "how the world works" in order to survive - more, perhaps, than we humans do (because we couldn't survive in those conditions). Likewise, a blacksmith may have more firsthand knowledge about the properties of iron and its alloys than a highly-trained theoretical physicist...

by nyc111 8y ago

FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago

A lot of times you don't know what you need. The point of a good curriculum is to help you avoid those situations as much as possible.

nyc111 8y ago
If the goal is to try to understand nature, make your own curriculum. Most people, myself included, initially believe the physics hype and believe that by studying academic physics they will gain new understanding of nature. I believe this is not the right way. It is better to start by asking a specific question. For instance, I am curious about what matter is. So I ask myself What is matter? and try to answer this question. I divide my question into smaller questions. Until I find a question easy enough to answer. I take it from there. But if I enter a physics curriculum in a university, I won't be able to ask this question for 20 years. The answer will always be in the future.
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  When you want to learn and use the simple abstractions that are just the other side of complexity that generalize the problem you are working on and its solution, what do you do? Do you hope for one?

fjsolwmv 8y ago

Not sure why you were downvoted. I agree that the average popular person will get more out of physics doing things they can (re)discover themselves, like Archimedes work on bouyancy and Newton's work on optics. Too many folks are stuck in the read/cram/exam mentality from competitive schooling.

eigenspace 8y ago

> The opposite of scholasticism is just-in-time knowledge. Whatever I need I can look it up. I understand the temptation to think this way but I really disagree. Scholasticism has serious problems but the solution is not 'just-in-time knowledge'. Scholastacism has been such a successfull approach for physicists exactly because the human mind is simply not equipped to approach much of modern physics. The scholastic traditions are in place to augment and fix our inherent mental deficiencies and prepare us to be able to understand physics. Approaching physics is not a knowledge problem. Its an understanding problem and true understanding takes work, not informaation delivery.

BeetleB 8y ago

I think I appreciate the point you are making, but you have gone a little too far in making that point. I've gone through a physics education, and I can attest that one can learn the material, be good at taking exams, and still do a poor job of applying it to the real world. The other extreme is as problematic, though. Knowing certain formalism in mathematics can really help in expressing a physics principle - and at times it takes a fair amount of seemingly pointless formalism to get to that point. >Scholastics claim that without spending two years studying calculus you cannot invert a matrix. (Because they make a living teaching you calculus.) I have no idea where this is coming from. In my education, we were taught matrix inversion a full year before calculus. I've studied matrix inversion multiple times in my academic career, and I don't remember calculus being invoked once. And to be frank, I'd be extremely wary of anyone claiming strong physics knowledge without learning calculus. Physics gained by leaps and bounds after calculus was introduced. It is the subject one can apply calculus most easily to, and is perhaps the reason we know more physics than any other discipline out there.

Koshkin 8y ago
> wary of anyone claiming strong physics knowledge Well, that depends. Faraday was a great physicist (his claims, whatever they may have been, notwithstanding).
- BeetleB 8y ago
  Are you suggesting that Faraday did not know calculus?
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    According to Wikipedia, "his mathematical abilities, however, did not extend as far as trigonometry and were limited to the simplest algebra."
nyc111 8y ago
> In my education, we were taught matrix inversion a full year before calculus. Thanks for correcting that. I need to find a better example. What I’m trying to say that is that, the academia or scholasticism teaches you a set curriculum. I think this is not the most productive way of learning. As an analogy, I don’t need to understand and memorize all the symbols of a programming language to write a program. I can have a basic understanding and then I can look up the rest as needed. Scholasticism doesn’t allow this.

Koshkin 8y ago

> But you do not need to study physics for 25 years in order to understand how the world works. True, that. But to each their own, and so everyone has a different requirement as to the depth of such knowledge to be considered an understanding. A squirrel knows enough about "how the world works" in order to survive - more, perhaps, than we humans do (because we couldn't survive in those conditions). Likewise, a blacksmith may have more firsthand knowledge about the properties of iron and its alloys than a highly-trained theoretical physicist...