3 ms·
> The idea that chemistry is separate from physics is pretty dumb anyway. Applying reduction to say "everyone young person should know everything" is hubris.
by Supermancho 7y ago
> The idea that chemistry is separate from physics is pretty dumb anyway.
Applying reduction to say "everyone young person should know everything" is hubris.
It's a practical division, at multiple levels. eg Specialization, profession, etc. Renaming (Molecular Dynamics) is just adding to the soup. Yes there is some overlap, but it's not worth trying to jam into the minds of students who dont have the drive or aptitude. re: Trying to teach everyone software development or CS
- filoeleven 7y agoAn example of reductionism in CS: one of the great minds of the field[0] adamantly believed that compiled programming languages were literally a waste of time, since the machine code they spit out was not as optimal as handwritten assembly and the compiler used extra computer time to build it. Can you imagine the state of CS today if that view had prevailed? Chemistry is a useful abstraction over physics in the same way. Hell, so is Newtonian mechanics over quantum mechanics, for that matter. The difference between these and my CS example is of course that the amount of stuff in physics itself is much more vast and undiscovered. The same is certainly true for biology, psychology, and sociology; and the exploration of their respective spaces are only hampered by focusing too much on the fields they rest upon. [0] I wish I could find the reference. I think it was Von Neumann.