What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists

Re:What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physic... by martincmartin on Thursday August 11, 2016 @05:18PM (#12271619)

a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the truth for the sake of press, while a mathematician sticks to the truth and as a result nobody cares.

I think it goes deeper than this. I was in the same undergraduate mathematics and physics classes as Nima Arkani-Hamed[1]. In calculus class, we learned very formal, epsilon-delta calculus (from Spivak's textbook). In physics, we learned from Feynman's Lectures on Physics.

Years later I went to lunch with him, and he mentioned that he spent much of his time fighting the formalist instincts from our Calculus class, and thinking more intuitively about mathematics. I do think physicists play more fast-and-loose with mathematics, e.g. using approximations like a few terms from a Taylor series, or other assumptions. When talking to the public, I can see how that would turn into playing fast-and-loose with the facts in order to "project" their knowledge into the space spanned by laypeople's knowledge, even if that projection loses important aspects of the work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nima_Arkani-Hamed

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Re:What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physic... by j2kun on Thursday August 11, 2016 @05:28PM (#12271684)

I think the "fast and loose" goes much deeper than using a few terms of a Taylor series approximation (more like ignoring non-convergence!). Because mathematicians have to go through the same process of shrugging off the formal rigor to think intuitively about mathematics. (Terry Tao wrote at length about this process)

I can understand the desire to appeal to a wide audience, but in this particular talk I couldn't identify a single bit of "projected" knowledge that one could hope to retain from the talk.

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Re:What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physic... by Retra on Thursday August 11, 2016 @08:21PM (#12272706)

> In calculus class, we learned very formal, epsilon-delta calculus (from Spivak's textbook). In physics, we learned from Feynman's Lectures on Physics.

Did you ever consider that this is because your physics instructor new you were taking such a math class and didn't want to waste his time teaching you what someone else was already teaching you? If you spent all your time in physics classes learning rigorous math, you'd never get around to learning what physics is about. You'd have to get your math degree first.

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