Science And Metaphysics

[Khandro]

I read from, 'Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in Vier Bänden', a biography of the Berlin German woman poet; Mascha Kaléko, that in 1952 she sent one of her poems to Albert Einstein, the opening line was; "Time stands still. It is us who are passing away".
Einstein replied: "I think your poem is very beautiful and rich in meaning. It touches upon a deep metaphysical problem that has become relevant through physics".
What do you think he meant by that?

[jomifl]

Jim, a friend of mine was trying to explain to his wife how the coriolis effect works in weather systems such as depressions, got bogged down trying to explain it mathematically and succeeded only in confusing her since her maths was poor. I demonstrated it with an orange and a biro pen, she understood perfectly, no maths required. Don't make the assumption that maths is the only tool people have to understand things. It isn't.

[Zacs-Master]

No! Pikturz is much betta for us fikkies.

[jomifl]

See! you understood with no maths well done.

[Khandro]

jim; //So far, according to most people I've met, I'm actually quite a good teacher -- though I'm sure I can be a better one.//
I think that is true, we can all be better teachers if we can drop the obfuscation, and get to the point succinctly, and not hide behind some 'special' knowledge. To put it in the vernacular; "cut the crap!".
Personally, I admired the way people such as Jacob Bronowkski could explain with simple elegance (The Assent of Man), relativity, the periodic table, etc, and never stray far from humanity, and so also with Einstein above, -THAT is good teaching!

[Hypognosis]

//I was just leaving for a game of golf, and thought I would throw it in to keep everyone occupied in my absence :-) //

Starting a debate, walking away and playing golf whilst others occupy themselves?

Isn't that classic troll behaviour?

[Hypognosis]

There's an apocryphal tale, that Stephen Hawking was advised, by his publisher, to include no more than one equation in "A Brief History of Time". A second equation would halve the sales of the book. A third equation would halve it again and so on.

I bought the book and it was an engaging and interesting read. However, so many other people also bought it that there was nothing you could tell anyone about black holes any more that they didn't already know. (There were others who didn't know what you now knew but they didn't care to find out). So readable as to be a self-defeating exercise. Why else do we indulge in mind-expanding books if not to impress our peers or use (sparingly) as conversational ice-breakers?

[silencefalls]

jim360 @ 17:09 2014-01-06 "Science is maths before it is words..."

I suppose it's down to what it means to do science. I think it can be conducted descriptively and without reference to maths first (in a loose sense we can use the Roman alphabet before we need the Greek symbols).

A couple of physics examples...

1) A hammer and a feather are dropped at the same time on the moon to see which falls quicker. This was actually done in 1971 by astronaut, Dave Scott. The hammer and feather were seen to fall to the moon's surface at the same rate. No numbers are needed here - let alone deep maths - to describe this experiment into the (weak) equivalence principle, that composition has no bearing on the acceleration objects undergo if they start at the same point in a given gravitational field.

2) Set up a rotating apparatus that makes two beams of light interfere - that is, we see a pattern of lighter and darker lines. Michelson and Morley famously did something like this. They saw no change in the light pattern whatever the orientation of the apparatus. The result has an important relation to the invariability of the speed of light in a vacuum.

[Khandro]

Hypo; "Golf is a game that needlessly prolongs the life of some of our most useless citizens." Bob Hope.
Everything that happens to the golf ball at impact can be described in scientific terms; angle of club-face, loft of chosen club, club speed, wind direction, the effect of the landing surface, etc. but when the stroke doesn't go to plan (as is mostly the case), golfers rarely speak in scientific terms!

[jim360]

"I demonstrated it with an orange and a biro pen, she understood perfectly, no maths required. Don't make the assumption that maths is the only tool people have to understand things. It isn't."

I'm at risk of flogging a dead horse here, but I'll carry on anyway. I highly doubt that she understood it "perfectly". Really? Could she reproduce the explanation to someone else, convincingly? Could she solve problems involving said effect? Possibly she could do the first, but certainly she could not do the second. That's no insult, but a reasonable statement of fact, given after all that you started off by saying that she couldn't follow the (mathematical) details.

No-one can understand something perfectly if they have only half the story. Visual demonstrations are a good place to start, but there will often remain questions that can only be answered with the detail.

http://xkcd.com/895/

That's a problem, and there's no point in pretending that it's not -- because it clearly is a problem, because too many people are not interested in the detail, or won't be able to follow it at the drop of a hat, and the result is that Science can be reduced to a bit of a parody really.

Also, the Coriolis effect, or gravity on the Moon, are very different problems from particle physics anyway in that there is a convincing and relatively easy visual demonstration of the principle. Want to see how gravity works absent air resistance? Drop a feather and a golf ball on the Moon. Want to understand Particle Physics? Sorry, but golf balls (or Thatcher walking into a room) won't cut it any more. And the result is that bad explanations are regarded as good ones, or that people think it's all just made-up or a waste of time, or listen to scare stories about the end of the world, and think they are genuine when they are not, and vice versa, and never know what to think.

[jake-the-peg]

Jim

Would you not accept that maths is actually just a descriptive tool for what we observe.

Yes sometimes the descriptive tool implies observations that are later shown correct

But it equally also implies observations which turn out not to be true too!

The crux of science is not mathematics but observation

I know that this is contraversial but I'd say Mathematics is the servant of experiment - not the other way around

[jim360]

Observation and experiment in the end must reign supreme, yes, of course -- but the language we need to describe the observations, explain them, predict them, analyse them, and everything else, is mathematics.

[naomi24]

Jim, you’re blinding yourself with science. The language you need to describe the method by which the observation was made might be mathematics but that is not the language you need to describe the observation itself to a layperson – as Jom has demonstrated.

[Khandro]

Wise man say; All great scientists are good mathematicians, but not all good mathematicians are great scientists.

[jim360]

I think, Naomi, that it depends on the example.

[naomi24]

As usual, you're not listening. Oh well, you can't say no one has tried. As I said, you have much to learn.

[jomifl]

Jim, you obviously use maths as a tool to understand things, others use words or images. Maths has the advantage of being able to describe some processes precisely but can not necessarily convey concepts as well as other methods. The coriolis effect is quite simple when explained visually and my friend's wife did understand it as she was not stupid. She was not going to need to predict the wind strength and direction for the next depression, the met office have computers to do that. It is equally possible to explain how the earth orbits the sun using only words or images.. no maths required.

[jim360]

I think that something's getting lost in translation here. Firstly, I don't see a point in trying to explain anything with the ful detail to people who are not going to be able to follow that detail -- like you've just said earlier, that's not an explanation. So, instead, when I do, I try an approach similar to this:

http://speedy.sh/XAKqT/rose-prize-gratrex.pdf

Assuming I've uploaded the correct document, this is my attempt to explain the concepts behind the Higgs boson. There was a word limit, and I'm currently in the process of expanding that article and going into some more detail, but that aside, as you can see there are no equations in the usual sense at all. Hopefully you'll get around to reading it. But if not, the point is that I relied on diagrams and words to try to convey the theme. If I did my job well, then everyone will be able to follow it even with next to no mathematical background at all.

So that's, anyway, both the way people say I should explain things and the way I already do. The point, though, is that for all that it's a good (or not, as the case may be) explanation, it necessarily leaves a lot of detail behind and hidden. My argument is that no explanation can possibly capture the full details of a subject if it doesn't include the full details of that subject to start with. I don't see how this can even be up for discussion -- of course it can't. Might as well try to describe a picture without seeing it, or music without listening to it, relying on just words. Such an explanation can be brilliant, and delivered by a brilliant speaker, but will still fail to be a complete explanation. And, therefore, those people who rely on that explanation without ever listening to the music, or seeing the picture, or examining the maths, for themselves, cannot understand that perfectly. Why is this controversial?

[jomifl]

jim, following that line of reasoning there would never be an adequate explanation of anything. Perfection can never be achieved...good enough is good enough.

[jim360]

Yes, that's pretty much my point, I think. No-one can explain anything perfectly. But they should, and I do, try anyway, as shown in the link above. I just think it's worth acknowledging this, rather than what sometimes seems to be the case, where people pretend as if the simple explanation is all that is needed.

[jake-the-peg]

All that is needed *for what* ?

Nobody can understand everything - You hear varius people named as the last person to fully understand all of physics but it's normally someone in the 19th century.

The level of understanding needed depends on the use to which you intend to put that understanding.

I think perhaps the problem is more often when people themselves don't understand or appreciate the limitations of their own understanding