5 ms·

> I'm just wondering if I'm being lazy by not trying hard enough or efficient. Leonard Susskind at Stanford has a series of courses specifically aimed at helpi

by abeppu 5y ago

> I'm just wondering if I'm being lazy by not trying hard enough or efficient. Leonard Susskind at Stanford has a series of courses specifically aimed at helping people get up to speed in understanding modern physics. Every several months I work up the enthusiasm to watch several lectures, and then I get distracted and forget it all. Clearly, it's because I'm not trying hard enough because there are so many other things to also be curious about. https://theoreticalminimum.com/ https://theoreticalminimum.com/ But I also wish that physics were less focused on understanding extremes, and more interested in understanding physical systems closer at hand. There are interesting recent-ish results found in the behavior of crumpling paper, collapsing piles of sand, or the 'legs' of wine in a glass. I suspect that we could have much richer conceptual tools for thinking about the physical world actually around us if only more resources went into looking at it, rather than into exploring how laws do or don't break down in extreme conditions that don't naturally exist near earth.

TheCowboy 5y ago
I can relate to this. It might seem stupid but understanding this made me change the way I tied my shoes, and my laces come undone way less frequently now. https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/04/11/shoe-string-theory-science-shows-why-shoelaces-come-untied/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/04/11/shoe-string-theory-scie... (Also thanks to everyone for their responses, a lot of good stuff to check out.)
- fho 5y ago
  Mandatory link to Ian's Shoelace Site: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/
  - jrace 5y ago
    This site helped me to realize I had been tying one of my shoes wrong my entire life.
gumby 5y ago
> But I also wish that physics were less focused on understanding extremes To defend this approach: Extrema are a good way to get a handle on a problem, which can then be extended. In programming we almost always have to handle the null case ("what if the graph is unpopulated?") and often an extreme case as well ("What if we end up with 10 million users? How to we quickly respond to XXX"). In physics, like so many other domains, the poles are often the most enlightening region. However, as you say, work on those extrema rarely translates into more common situations until a breakthrough happens.
- moonchrome 5y ago
  >In programming we almost always have to handle the null case ("what if the graph is unpopulated?") and often an extreme case as well ("What if we end up with 10 million users? How to we quickly respond to XXX"). Even the extreme case has to be somewhat realistic to be worth considering. Physics has gone way past that point once they started building accelerators larger than cities to detect subatomic reactions. Not saying it's not worth investigating but it's not at all comparable to any practical domain, at this point it's l'art pour l'art.
  - svachalek 5y ago
    It's realistic, they are learning about the particles that make up everything on Earth. But not necessarily pragmatic, in that there aren't likely new uses for that knowledge in the foreseeable future. Still, imagine what we can do once we've achieved a model of how it all really works.
    - moonchrome 5y ago
      I don't really know how the model enables much if it requires that kind of effort to test the predictions. If the predictions implied something more practical you could test that. I think the time where this kind of physics breakthroughs lead to anything useful is gone. At the same time I think there's stuff that's much more practical with still a lot of discoveries to be made - like superconductivity.
  - 5y ago
tobmlt 5y ago
>>> I suspect that we could have much richer conceptual tools for thinking about the physical world actually around us if only more resources went into looking at it What I hear in this statement is more towards the domains of research engineering as opposed to theoretical physics. Sand piles are of course the bridge between the two ;)
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >Sand piles are of course the bridge between the two ;) Bridges are an engineering topic, most coastal areas lie on sedimentary rocks, and wormholes, a theoretical physics topic, are also called "Einstein–Rosen bridges." In other words, while bridges are bridges between sand piles and sand piles, sand piles are bridges between bridges and bridges.
  - tobmlt 5y ago
    Yes. You took the entropy right out of my mouth.
- abeppu 5y ago
  I was thinking more along the lines of complex system research, self-organizing criticality etc. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_sandpile_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_sandpile_model This can be a scientific rather than an engineering discipline, insofar as it's concerned with understanding the behavior of systems, rather than creating a solution which makes a system behave according to our wishes. We have a limited understanding of "order" or patterns arising out of systems with many aggregating interactions, and often focusing on relatively idealized and isolated systems.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
Are these videos working for you guys?
- pas 5y ago
  For me Firefox blocks the YT embeds: https://www.youtube.com/embed/a6ANMKRBjA8?version=3&modestbranding=1&hd=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=0&rel=0 https://www.youtube.com/embed/a6ANMKRBjA8?version=3&modestbr...
zopa 5y ago
Quantum gravity gets the headlines, but only a pretty tiny minority of physicists actually work on stuff like that. Most people are researching problems much closer to hand. Basically the utopia you're looking for is already here.
sharikone 5y ago
Let's be real. There are more physicists than fitting research problems. That's why your average physics PhD graduate is typically employed outside of the field they learned and earns less than an average React programmer. That said, theoretical physics has the goal of understanding reality from a reductionist point of view. At the scales that goes from the nucleus to the Solar system there are few questions left. We know the Standard Model and GR and they fit the data perfectly. Of course some questions remain for how things interact when there are many of them (e.g. warm superconductivity) but there are few questions about fundamental laws You can think about it like bootstrapping an open source system (it was in the homepage today). There are still many technical hurdles downstream but we are interested in reducing the binary blob from which all starts to its perfect minimal form. And the only places we still have not figured out well are things at the limit of our instrument capacity. Black holes (GR and relativity, we still cannot figure out that and proving black hole seems experimentally challenging), exotic particles (what are quarks composed of?), dark matter (why far away galaxies seem to rotate so quickly?), dark energy, inflation, that stuff. I think physics should be smaller, it has too many graduates. But actually these problems should be researched. They are the fundamental questions that remain and there is a reason that the layman considers this stuff to be "real physics" and not origami folding
- avmich 5y ago
  > That's why your average physics PhD graduate is typically employed outside of the field they learned and earns less than an average React programmer. Ha, I used to think that a big chunk of physicists by education are employed outside of the field they learned and earn top 10% salary of the industry doing software in financial companies. Heard more than once that computer science is easier than physics. Physical background helps hugely with software.
  - porknubbins 5y ago
    How would physics help with software though? My impression from trying physics is that its just that if you are smart enough to do physics you are smart enough that software engineering is not really hard but at most merely complicated.
pas 5y ago
wine legs on applied science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6w0tSg-msk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6w0tSg-msk ! And let me randomly throw in metallic water too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdz18ibX7rE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdz18ibX7rE

by abeppu 5y ago

TheCowboy 5y ago

I can relate to this. It might seem stupid but understanding this made me change the way I tied my shoes, and my laces come undone way less frequently now. https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/04/11/shoe-string-theory-science-shows-why-shoelaces-come-untied/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/04/11/shoe-string-theory-scie... (Also thanks to everyone for their responses, a lot of good stuff to check out.)

fho 5y ago
Mandatory link to Ian's Shoelace Site: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/
- jrace 5y ago
  This site helped me to realize I had been tying one of my shoes wrong my entire life.

gumby 5y ago

> But I also wish that physics were less focused on understanding extremes To defend this approach: Extrema are a good way to get a handle on a problem, which can then be extended. In programming we almost always have to handle the null case ("what if the graph is unpopulated?") and often an extreme case as well ("What if we end up with 10 million users? How to we quickly respond to XXX"). In physics, like so many other domains, the poles are often the most enlightening region. However, as you say, work on those extrema rarely translates into more common situations until a breakthrough happens.

moonchrome 5y ago
>In programming we almost always have to handle the null case ("what if the graph is unpopulated?") and often an extreme case as well ("What if we end up with 10 million users? How to we quickly respond to XXX"). Even the extreme case has to be somewhat realistic to be worth considering. Physics has gone way past that point once they started building accelerators larger than cities to detect subatomic reactions. Not saying it's not worth investigating but it's not at all comparable to any practical domain, at this point it's l'art pour l'art.
- svachalek 5y ago
  It's realistic, they are learning about the particles that make up everything on Earth. But not necessarily pragmatic, in that there aren't likely new uses for that knowledge in the foreseeable future. Still, imagine what we can do once we've achieved a model of how it all really works.
  - moonchrome 5y ago
    I don't really know how the model enables much if it requires that kind of effort to test the predictions. If the predictions implied something more practical you could test that. I think the time where this kind of physics breakthroughs lead to anything useful is gone. At the same time I think there's stuff that's much more practical with still a lot of discoveries to be made - like superconductivity.
- 5y ago

tobmlt 5y ago

>>> I suspect that we could have much richer conceptual tools for thinking about the physical world actually around us if only more resources went into looking at it What I hear in this statement is more towards the domains of research engineering as opposed to theoretical physics. Sand piles are of course the bridge between the two ;)

whatshisface 5y ago
>Sand piles are of course the bridge between the two ;) Bridges are an engineering topic, most coastal areas lie on sedimentary rocks, and wormholes, a theoretical physics topic, are also called "Einstein–Rosen bridges." In other words, while bridges are bridges between sand piles and sand piles, sand piles are bridges between bridges and bridges.
- tobmlt 5y ago
  Yes. You took the entropy right out of my mouth.
abeppu 5y ago
I was thinking more along the lines of complex system research, self-organizing criticality etc. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_sandpile_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_sandpile_model This can be a scientific rather than an engineering discipline, insofar as it's concerned with understanding the behavior of systems, rather than creating a solution which makes a system behave according to our wishes. We have a limited understanding of "order" or patterns arising out of systems with many aggregating interactions, and often focusing on relatively idealized and isolated systems.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

Are these videos working for you guys?

pas 5y ago
For me Firefox blocks the YT embeds: https://www.youtube.com/embed/a6ANMKRBjA8?version=3&modestbranding=1&hd=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=0&rel=0 https://www.youtube.com/embed/a6ANMKRBjA8?version=3&modestbr...

zopa 5y ago

Quantum gravity gets the headlines, but only a pretty tiny minority of physicists actually work on stuff like that. Most people are researching problems much closer to hand. Basically the utopia you're looking for is already here.

sharikone 5y ago

Let's be real. There are more physicists than fitting research problems. That's why your average physics PhD graduate is typically employed outside of the field they learned and earns less than an average React programmer. That said, theoretical physics has the goal of understanding reality from a reductionist point of view. At the scales that goes from the nucleus to the Solar system there are few questions left. We know the Standard Model and GR and they fit the data perfectly. Of course some questions remain for how things interact when there are many of them (e.g. warm superconductivity) but there are few questions about fundamental laws You can think about it like bootstrapping an open source system (it was in the homepage today). There are still many technical hurdles downstream but we are interested in reducing the binary blob from which all starts to its perfect minimal form. And the only places we still have not figured out well are things at the limit of our instrument capacity. Black holes (GR and relativity, we still cannot figure out that and proving black hole seems experimentally challenging), exotic particles (what are quarks composed of?), dark matter (why far away galaxies seem to rotate so quickly?), dark energy, inflation, that stuff. I think physics should be smaller, it has too many graduates. But actually these problems should be researched. They are the fundamental questions that remain and there is a reason that the layman considers this stuff to be "real physics" and not origami folding

avmich 5y ago
> That's why your average physics PhD graduate is typically employed outside of the field they learned and earns less than an average React programmer. Ha, I used to think that a big chunk of physicists by education are employed outside of the field they learned and earn top 10% salary of the industry doing software in financial companies. Heard more than once that computer science is easier than physics. Physical background helps hugely with software.
- porknubbins 5y ago
  How would physics help with software though? My impression from trying physics is that its just that if you are smart enough to do physics you are smart enough that software engineering is not really hard but at most merely complicated.

pas 5y ago

wine legs on applied science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6w0tSg-msk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6w0tSg-msk ! And let me randomly throw in metallic water too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdz18ibX7rE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdz18ibX7rE