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Yes. First, intuition depends on your experience. If you never studied physics, most things will be nonintuitive (heavy bodies don't fall faster than light ones

by effie 7y ago

Yes. First, intuition depends on your experience. If you never studied physics, most things will be nonintuitive (heavy bodies don't fall faster than light ones? really?) Second, modern 20th century physics education (courses, textbooks) suffered sustained corruption of methodology by scientific authorities, where the quest for understanding was renounced in favor of "modelling" and "prediction" (e.g. authors of orthodox quantum theory and their less bright pupils perpetuating that attitude) and later by institutionalized system of university research which propels tweaking and applying old ideas to detriment of trying new ones or questioning past ideas that are too ingrained. This leads to a large portion of theoretical physics publications being more and more about complex calculations where most applicators do not even try to understand "what is going on", they just assume the same quantum methodology with some tweaks (i.e. different configuration spaces, more dimensions, different Lagrangians, new fields that fix problems of the previous ones, tricks with removing some ugly series terms etc). Sometimes these tweaks get fancy names (superstrings, loops, dark matter) but they are really an additional concept that needs to be put in to save the edifice from those radicals who would like to try actually new and incompatible ideas. When you study 20th century physics yourself from original sources, you'll find the stuff taught currently actually has highly varying degree of credibility. Some stuff is rock solid, such as relativity, molecular theory and chemistry, nuclear physics and solid state theory, and some stuff is ... well, more unfinished and less credible - such as standard model, force unification, quantum gravity, dark matter, etc.). If you want to get some solid ground on which to build intuition, start with the rock-solid physics as known till 1905, then after that makes sense, learn about its problems (explanation of emission spectra, inconsistency of EM theory with Newtonian mechanics), then after that take a deep breath and read original papers on quantum theory and particle/nuclear physics. This will take years to understand. The later theoretical stuff around Standard Model details (lepton generations, stability of particles, unification of gravity and QFT) is a decades old project that nobody knows how to finish. It is stuck for now, and has little relevance for understanding those previous things.

samcodes 7y ago
Yeah, if the author of the parent comment is willing to put in work to get the understanding they claim to want, this is the way to go
pas 7y ago
Hm. Comparing paradigm shifts with model based realism is not really valid criticism of either, yet understandable. The folks who just added one more term to the old stuff to make it predict better - let's call them the old guard necessarily did it to point out that old models can become slightly new ones too. Even if in the long run they will be seen as the evil holdouts. Yet at the same time we know that just whipping up a new fancy maths model won't solve anything in itself. New models need to make new testable predictions. And then even new models require lengthy fine tuning, which requires costly experiments. Alas textbooks are very often terrible, but not because they emphasize predictions and models over "understanding" - but usually because they omit to elaborate on how to select the better of two models, how paradigm shifts happen, how anomalies are ever present - and thus make practical model selection even harder. Plus they regularly fuck up the math explanation part, exactly because they use terrible language and models. Finally, it's always data that cleans up the mess. Either practical usefulness - engineering, applied science. Quantum experiments, q-bits, and so on. And on the high-energy end cosmology and astronomy. Anyone harking about how the crisis is about politics usually wants to allocate more money to theorists, so we will finally get breakthrough theories. Yeah, great, we already have a lot of those, but without data we don't know which one to take seriously. Furthermore pouring money into theory is a nice idea, and comparatively cheap (compared to a new collider), but that won't solve the very pragmatic employment question for the collider builders. (Who are out of luck anyway, because the era of building bigger underground circles seems to be over. But they would gladly build anything, but they won't make good theorists, even if pundits' articles seem to imply there's a simple slider between theory and experimentation.)

by effie 7y ago

samcodes 7y ago

Yeah, if the author of the parent comment is willing to put in work to get the understanding they claim to want, this is the way to go

pas 7y ago

Hm. Comparing paradigm shifts with model based realism is not really valid criticism of either, yet understandable. The folks who just added one more term to the old stuff to make it predict better - let's call them the old guard necessarily did it to point out that old models can become slightly new ones too. Even if in the long run they will be seen as the evil holdouts. Yet at the same time we know that just whipping up a new fancy maths model won't solve anything in itself. New models need to make new testable predictions. And then even new models require lengthy fine tuning, which requires costly experiments. Alas textbooks are very often terrible, but not because they emphasize predictions and models over "understanding" - but usually because they omit to elaborate on how to select the better of two models, how paradigm shifts happen, how anomalies are ever present - and thus make practical model selection even harder. Plus they regularly fuck up the math explanation part, exactly because they use terrible language and models. Finally, it's always data that cleans up the mess. Either practical usefulness - engineering, applied science. Quantum experiments, q-bits, and so on. And on the high-energy end cosmology and astronomy. Anyone harking about how the crisis is about politics usually wants to allocate more money to theorists, so we will finally get breakthrough theories. Yeah, great, we already have a lot of those, but without data we don't know which one to take seriously. Furthermore pouring money into theory is a nice idea, and comparatively cheap (compared to a new collider), but that won't solve the very pragmatic employment question for the collider builders. (Who are out of luck anyway, because the era of building bigger underground circles seems to be over. But they would gladly build anything, but they won't make good theorists, even if pundits' articles seem to imply there's a simple slider between theory and experimentation.)