I also would like to argue that it doesn't have to "garner attention rapidly on a large scale" to be recognized by the masses, but rather just spark their imaginations in general.
I disagree. My opinion on whether you might get the impression is that you need to argue with "sexy knowledge" in research proposals.
The whole quantum mechanics philosophy crossover is a huge messy confusion as a result of this (many worlds shroedingers cat) - and that even affects even many physicists.
One of these things is not like the others...
I'm curious what topics you have in mind? My everyday life is like 90% Newtonian mechanics, 9% thermodynamics, and 1% fluid mechanics (percentages completely made up). Or are you thinking like E&M for phones and stuff?
For me, the more annoying aspect to this is that the "it's all relative man" has infected even more techincal discussions to the point where engineering and settled science is treated as just more "woo woo" by people who could know better.
*I do not remember nor care what it's called. I'm sure you know what I mean anyway.
Because those things sound exotic and interesting. Just like (statistically) nobody goes to the natural history museum to look at chicken-sized dinosaurs.
Physically scaling up small things may indeed be problematic, but with the assistance of VR or AR, one might be able to digitally scale it up. [Here I'm remembering my love of The Magic Schoolbus series.]
Even less exciting things like seeing how the doppler effect led almost directly to the concept of the big bang is something that seems critical. That it's not (or, hopefully was not) a normal part of curricula seems odd. Even things like the mind boggling implications of the various conservation laws are just incredible. That topic is at least covered in lower education, but rarely if ever in such a way as to really elucidate how incredible these rules are, and all that can be derived from them.
I do think that everyone should have access to such a syllabus though. More realistic if less transformative might be a program of teaching people very basic critical thinking skills. Use advertisements and Instagram posts to analyze deceptive languages and images. Show people that the world they think they live in, that’s projected all of their screens isn’t a very accurate representation of reality. Drive map-territory relations into them via the medium of political, corporate, and interpersonal deception they experience multiple times every day. Maybe half of them would get that, if it was made interesting enough to hold their attention.
So you can get still get the wonder by dropping the rigor, and you end up with What the bleep or The secret
It's kind of the same way that more people would be interested in computer science because of strong AI rather than binary search trees.
I mean when you study Physics you learn to use apparently confusing tools - theoretical or experimental - with confidence. Sometimes in areas that only few people find interesting/appealing, like for instance complex problems in classical mechanics or thermodynamics. Only 1% of the studies is about crazy, absolutely counter-intuitive stuff that sounds like Sci-Fi. But isn't that what differentiates the amateur from the Pro? ;)
I mean if people want to do actual Research Physics, they must either go to a University (offline or online) or be mega disciplined. In the latter case they need a few more books though/adjust them also to personal taste.
I think, though, that if you want to understand physics, it probably makes sense to devote some of your time to understanding what physicists are excited about.
I have a feeling (and this is heavy speculation) that a lot of strong physicists were fed on pop physics and science fiction before they learned the hard science. This helps approach the subject with an inborn curiosity, which can focus your attention when learning technical subjects.
Pop physics books may not be the ideal way to do this, but it's probably better than nothing at all.
On the other hand, they are very harmful to serious, but "boring" research proposals.
Would you mind giving some examples of what kind of "simple and beautiful principles" you have in mind?
- Advanced high school: You can use conservation of energy or other "conservation laws" as a guiding principle. This lets you solve a problem with just a couple of lines of simple algebra. On the other hand, using the "naive" approach of studying the forces that act on the system would require heavy algebra and some calculus.
- College: Instead of calculating the path of a ray of light through some inhomogeneous piece of transparent matter by doing some form of raytracing, you can use Fermat's "minimization principle". They are equivalent, but a rigorous definition of the minimization principle is a single sentence, while the other approach takes a lot of work to express clearly.
- Advanced college: Conservation laws are actually consequences of symmetries. Instead of thinking in terms of a complicated expression for energies and momenta, you can say that they are consequences of the fact that the laws of the universe do not change from today to tomorrow.
Yes, the more simple and beautiful a principle is, the more abstract it is. However, the simplicity and ease of working with it makes the abstraction worth it.
Just like in C you can have your own weird struct that implements objects and higher order functions, but using a functional or object oriented language makes everything safer and easier and more readable.
For those unfamiliar, this is essentially the content of Noether's Theorem[0]. One of many beautiful contributions of Emmy Noether.
I've heard several physicists describe it as one of the most beautiful theorems in physics.
what would u recommend in its place?
I have some bad news for Susan.
>One big problem is that a lot of the popular books written about physics (especially those by famous physicists) are incredibly speculative and tend to present an unrealistic view of what the study of physics is all about. When you're learning physics, it's good to avoid these types of speculative books, and stick to the good ones that talk about the real physics we know exists.
Oh god yes. Why is it that whenever a lay person wants to talk about physics they talk about "11 dimensions", "string theory", or "time dilation", or any similarly crazy-sounding term that they read in a massively incorrect pop-sci article. Basically it makes it sound like physics is about all this crazy complicated and far-fetched ideas, rather than simple and beautiful principles to understand reality, which is what it is.
I don't know if I managed to convey what I mean.