6 ms·
In The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll recounts an episode from the oral defense of his astrophysics PhD thesis. A bunch of people ask questions but one prof holds bac
by staplung 8mo ago
In The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll recounts an episode from the oral defense of his astrophysics PhD thesis. A bunch of people ask questions but one prof holds back until...
"""
“I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he says, carving his way through the Eberhard-Faber. “Why is the sky blue?”
My mind is absolutely, profoundly blank. I have no idea. I look out the window at the sky with the primitive, uncomprehending wonder of a Neanderthal contemplating fire. I force myself to say something—anything. “Scattered light,” I reply. “Uh, yeah, scattered sunlight.”
“Could you be more specific?”
Well, words came from somewhere, out of some deep instinct of self-preservation. I babbled about the spectrum of sunlight, the upper atmosphere, and how light interacts with molecules of air.
“Could you be more specific?”
I’m describing how air molecules have dipole moments, the wave-particle duality of light, scribbling equations on the blackboard, and . . .
“Could you be more specific?”
An hour later, I’m sweating hard. His simple question—a five-year-old’s question—has drawn together oscillator theory, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, even quantum mechanics. Even in my miserable writhing, I admired the guy…
"""
- ecshafer 8mo ago"Could you be more specific" is a great question to find out more what the person knows and how they thing. You give an answer that, just due to the nature of knowledge and the limitation of language, has some black boxes. And "could you be more specific" is basically asking to go through the black boxes. Its like asking how does Java work or something like that? You can go from "The JVM interprets java byte code" to quite a lot of depth on how various parts work if you have enough knowledge.
- leeoniya 8mo agoi used something like this in unstructured technical interviews all the time. "you type a phrase into google search, you press enter, get some results. tell me, in technical detail, what happened in that chain of actions" the diversity of replies is fascinating, you learn a lot about a "full stack" candidate this way. Feynman's classic "Why?" chain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA
- SAI_Peregrinus 8mo agoI'd probably spend at least 20 minutes just to get through how the keyboard works, much more if it's a USB-HID device.
- dmd 8mo agoHah - that is exactly what I did. Someone asked me this question and after 5 minutes in the weeds of the debounce on the mouse click they said "look all we wanted was to find out if you'd ever heard of DNS, let's move on, that was great".
- leeoniya 8mo agothe good ones would usually follow up with, "how much detail do you _really_ want ;D"
- pas 8mo agoI always wanted to talk about our lord and savior (BGP) but so far no one took the bait!
- mgemard 8mo agoThere is a chapter on why the sky is blue in The Feynman Lectures : https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_32.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_32.html
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- HPsquared 8mo agoIt's reminds me of that scene from Fargo: "He was kinda funny lookin'" ... "Could ya be any more specific?"
- ASalazarMX 8mo agoA great response is "What exactly do you want to know?", so we don't end up like Cliff giving answer after answer. In his case it was a great test question, but such a vague question is a horrible communication tactic if abused.
- noduerme 8mo agoHaving two older brothers who are famous trial lawyers, I can attest that it's both an effective line of questioning and a deeply infuriating one. What I learned is that up to a certain point, it's feigned ignorance probing whether one knows a principle behind a stated principle. Beyond that point, though, you can basically make shit up and they won't know the difference. Come to think of it, this is also the sleight-of-hand pulled by LLMs when you ask them for more and more detailed answers. The trick is knowing when your interrogator no longer knows the answer. [edit] Also, in my family, you'd ask Dad these questions. And if he didn't know the answer, he'd pull out the Britannica, and have you look it up, then go over it with you until he understood it well enough to explain it. "No short answers" was his motto. (He was also a trial lawyer). Most people are just not equipped to handle cross-examination, and it's scary for them... but the primary reason is that they never learned to admit when they don't know the answer.to a question, and that admitting you don't know is not a failing, but actually a strength, especially if it impels your curiosity to go find the answer.
- SAI_Peregrinus 8mo agoIt also needs a bit of biology. Our eyes don't have a flat response over frequency, they're more sensitive to blue than violet. Violet gets scattered even more than blue, and the violet light does shift our perception of the color. But it does so less than it would if we had photoreceptors more sensitive to violet, so the resulting perceptual color depends not just on the intensity of the light at different frequencies but also on our particular biology. People with tritanopia (blue-yellow color blindness) don't have blue-sensitive cones (S cones) and thus to them there is no perceived blue. Not to mention the linguistic history of the word "blue" and why English uses "blue" instead of "青" or some other word, the questions around qualia & what it means to perceive color, etc.
- reactordev 8mo agoThe real question is, is the sky blue for everyone? Some creatures can see ultraviolet. Some lack color at all…
- mncharity 8mo agoI puttered on a color interactive where, to emphasize this distinction between world-spectra vs brain-color, you could swap in color deficiencies, a non-primate mammal ( dichromats), and a monochromat.
- reactordev 8mo agothis is fascinating because I'm red/green color deficient yet I have no problem seeing most reds or greens. I feel there's a "spectrum" of color that we all see and each of us is slightly different. My shade of green may not be your shade of green. Yet, when I point out my shade of green - it matches your shade of green because of our eyes. Even though we may be perceiving entirely different colors.
- AlotOfReading 8mo agoMost colorblind people aren't dichromats, they're so-called anomalous trichromats. Basically, the genes coding opsins in your eyes have a number of functional sites that tune the spectral sensitivity. Those sites are tuned as far apart as they can be in color-normal humans. Anomalous trichromats usually have a genetic error that causes their opsins' sensitivity curves to overlap more, which manifests as reduced color sensitivity.
- jstummbillig 8mo agoI am positively excited about the upcoming first generation of humans who will have all their questions answered, correctly and in the way they can best understand, and as often and many of them as they want – and what that is going to enable.
- brabel 8mo agoThe same anticipation of great things happening preceded the arrival of widely available internet, but all we really got was cat videos initially, and doomscrolling more recently. I don’t have much hope for great things anymore.
- reactordev 8mo agoWe got more than that. We got 24/7 surveillance.
- mncharity 8mo agoI saw a Microsoft talk decades back, that was a dispirited "the people of India could be buying educational materials and... but no, all the money is in ringtones". For some kinds of business perspective, ok I guess. But for others, and for civilizational change, what's going on in the tail can matter a lot. Does China become a US engineering/science peer in early 21st C absent an internet/WWW?
- eru 8mo agoWell, the thing is that the educational materials are largely free. That's why the people of India don't need to buy them. Isn't that a better world than one where the ringtones were free?
- mncharity 8mo agoAh, perhaps I should have said something like "educational materials, and apps, and other useful things" (disapproving judgement in the original). > Well, the thing is that the educational materials are largely free. A triumph and fruition of these last decades of massive effort. Now we just need to deal with their quality (with commercial as bad as free). AI may help, by reducing barriers to content creation - you might for example, now more easily author an intro astronomy textbook, one that doesn't reinforce top-30 common misconceptions, something the most used (US; commercial) texts still don't manage.
- SwtCyber 8mo agoWhat I love is that the question is child-simple but bottomless
- hackeraccount 8mo agoI remember reading this - first thing I thought of too when I saw the headline.
- Ferret7446 8mo agoA great story, though it seems a little odd to me since Rayleigh scattering was covered in my undergrad exoplanets course. I'd expect an astrophysics PhD to have a better first answer than "scattered sunlight".