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It is all worth questioning. The hard job of the experts is determining the minimal experiments to show people that will convince them of far reaching theories

It is all worth questioning. The hard job of the experts is determining the minimal experiments to show people that will convince them of far reaching theories. For me that is the true measure of expertise in an educator. Your good physics instructors will have you go through the photoelectric effect, the Millikin drop experiment, electron/beta ray diffraction experiments (possibly a few other). Maybe you build a transistor. You will see the necessity of quantum mechanics to explain your experience. Generally, at that point, you might question other quantum effects, but you are confident if you do the more complex experiements, you will see the necessity. You will probably have learned what those experiments are as well. Black holes are another story. I recall still encountering astrophysicists that wouldn't be convinced of the necessity of their existence. Special relativity you can get to accept via the Michelson-Morley experiment or similar experiments proving the constancy of the speed of light. From there you can sort of accept a need for a relativistic theory of gravity. But the evidence for GR starts to come from complex astrophysical measurements that you cannot really replicate and need to trust the (processed) data. The gravitational wave signatures can be convincing if you already know the math... but too many people feel that a simpler theory is just around the corner--a simpler theory without the singularities. Dark matter and dark energy face similar (but with their own variations of) skepticism.

Dudeman112 4y ago
>It is all worth questioning Only if you are happy to spend your life never doing anything but questioning what's already there The corpus of knowledge of any one field takes more than a lifetime to properly validate by yourself, and lots of them cannot be validated at all because you don't have infinite funds Alas mankind dropped the ball in regards to dealing with anti-senescence, so picking your battles should be self-evident
- cf141q5325 4y ago
  What you focus your research on is always a big personal gamble. Be it questioning something that seems evident or walking along beaten paths that still might turn out to be wrong. But as long as you stick to the scientific method you will at least generate a result so that future researchers wont waste their time on the same approach. In the end evidence hopefully prevails on the societal level. It might just take some time.
mbreese 4y ago
> minimal experiments to show people that will convince them of far reaching theories. For me that is the true measure of expertise in an educator. For me, some of the best lectures I had in grad school were the ones that basically said “we know X because of this experiment”. And then went into the details of the experiment and the results. It’s simultaneously exciting and scary to learn how easy and simple many experiments are. To this day though, the thing that really surprises[1] me is how timing affects a field. For example, in my field (molecular biology), the technique of geometric amplification of DNA by PCR was widely available before I was in undergrad. This was a tool we took for granted. However, for my undergrad advisor, it was still a new-ish technique that was exciting. In grad school, Sanger sequencing machines were widely available, so we could directly sequence DNA quickly and easily. But the lab I was in still had the equipment and ability to run large sequencing gels to sequence DNA manually. By the time I was done with grad school, high throughput sequencing (NGS) and the human genome were completed. New students now take both of these things for granted. Knowing the full (ish) sequence of an organisms genome makes many experiments significantly easier (or even possible!). CRISPR/cas9 technology is the same - a tool that has come of age within the past decade or so. But these are resources and techniques that new students can just accept as available. They aren’t magic and novel to them… they are just another tool to be used to answer their questions. [1] surprises isn’t quite the right word… impresses? Actually… encourages or amazes might be the better word to use. I find this flow of progress amazing to watch.
specialist 4y ago
> Your good physics instructors will have you... Absolutely. Learn by doing. I have no idea what's happening in K-12 class rooms today. But I was fortunate to have had 3 or 4 teachers who had us actually do stuff.

Dudeman112 4y ago

>It is all worth questioning Only if you are happy to spend your life never doing anything but questioning what's already there The corpus of knowledge of any one field takes more than a lifetime to properly validate by yourself, and lots of them cannot be validated at all because you don't have infinite funds Alas mankind dropped the ball in regards to dealing with anti-senescence, so picking your battles should be self-evident

cf141q5325 4y ago
What you focus your research on is always a big personal gamble. Be it questioning something that seems evident or walking along beaten paths that still might turn out to be wrong. But as long as you stick to the scientific method you will at least generate a result so that future researchers wont waste their time on the same approach. In the end evidence hopefully prevails on the societal level. It might just take some time.

mbreese 4y ago

> minimal experiments to show people that will convince them of far reaching theories. For me that is the true measure of expertise in an educator. For me, some of the best lectures I had in grad school were the ones that basically said “we know X because of this experiment”. And then went into the details of the experiment and the results. It’s simultaneously exciting and scary to learn how easy and simple many experiments are. To this day though, the thing that really surprises[1] me is how timing affects a field. For example, in my field (molecular biology), the technique of geometric amplification of DNA by PCR was widely available before I was in undergrad. This was a tool we took for granted. However, for my undergrad advisor, it was still a new-ish technique that was exciting. In grad school, Sanger sequencing machines were widely available, so we could directly sequence DNA quickly and easily. But the lab I was in still had the equipment and ability to run large sequencing gels to sequence DNA manually. By the time I was done with grad school, high throughput sequencing (NGS) and the human genome were completed. New students now take both of these things for granted. Knowing the full (ish) sequence of an organisms genome makes many experiments significantly easier (or even possible!). CRISPR/cas9 technology is the same - a tool that has come of age within the past decade or so. But these are resources and techniques that new students can just accept as available. They aren’t magic and novel to them… they are just another tool to be used to answer their questions. [1] surprises isn’t quite the right word… impresses? Actually… encourages or amazes might be the better word to use. I find this flow of progress amazing to watch.

specialist 4y ago

> Your good physics instructors will have you... Absolutely. Learn by doing. I have no idea what's happening in K-12 class rooms today. But I was fortunate to have had 3 or 4 teachers who had us actually do stuff.