/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.3052203]

Read it and weep, physicists.

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-man-behind-the-curtain/1

[Anonymous No.3052212]

TL;DR

[Anonymous No.3052214]

>implying American Scientist has ever published anything actually relevant to scientists

[Anonymous No.3052215]

>>3052212
My instructor said it made him feel like he was lying to his students for all these years

[Anonymous No.3052220]

>>3052215

My instructor said you were gay.

[Anonymous No.3052247]

>>3052203
poorly written and way too long. basically all he is saying is that when you go beyond the simple carefully contrived problems they have in intro physics books, the problems get extremely difficult very quickly, and quickly lead into stuff that is still theoretical.

[Anonymous No.3052265]

>>3052220
Problem?

[Anonymous No.3052269]

>>3052247
u mad illiterate physicist?

[Anonymous No.3052271]

This article reads like it was written by some faggot engineer undergrad who watches a lot of popsci and thinks he's being edgy by alluding to a higher power.

[sage No.3052280]

>>3052203
THE MOST OBVIOUS TROLL EVER!
EVEN USES A TROLL IMAGE!

/sci/ still replies
WTF /sci/?

>inb4 200 replies

[Anonymous No.3052355]

Dat conclusion, fuck you OP.

>Even towards the end of the twentieth century, physics was regarded as received Truth, a revelation of the face of God. Some physicists may still believe that, but I prefer to think of physics as a collection of models, models that map the territory, but are never the territory itself. That may smack of defeatism to many, but ultimate answers are not to be grasped by mortals. Physicists have indeed gone further than other scientists in describing the natural world; they should not confuse description with understanding.

[Anonymous No.3052360]

>12:30 AM
>4 page wall of text

What the fuck do you take me for? Do you really expect me to read all this shit? Come back in the morning.

[Anonymous No.3052377]

>>3052203
Huh? OP thinks this is news?

[Anonymous No.3054038]

>>3052247
>>3052271
"N....NUH-UH!"

That's what you sound like.

[Anonymous No.3054272]

bump, just started reading the article

[Anonymous No.3054297]

great scott!

[Anonymous No.3054447]

sort of makes me regret choosing physics as a major...

[Anonymous No.3054555]

>>3054447
>Quantum electrodynamics itself is, however, famously riddled with infinities, and to abolish them requires the further ad hoc procedure of renormalization, which was so distasteful to Paul Dirac that he ceased doing physics altogether.

[Anonymous No.3054603]

So...his point is physics has deep, fundamental flaws...what is exactly is the flaw? Are mathematics to blame? What about the determinism inherent to all science? In that case, can we know anything?

[Anonymous No.3054613]

>>3054603
>What about the determinism implied to all science
ftfy, read more critically next time.

[Anonymous No.3054632]

Well I'm glad I just read 4 whole pages of nothing. What were you trying to prove OP?

[Grothendieck !Topos4qCwc No.3054644]

What an incredibly novel article, surely no one has ever considered precisely the same ideas. Certainly not ~80 years ago.

[Anonymous No.3054645]

All he's saying is that physics is made of models, and that scientific truth is an oxymore. Everybody learns that by himself during his studies.

[Anonymous No.3054648]

>>3054644

BRINGING IN THE DUHEM TRAIN

[Anonymous No.3054664]

This text is pretty stupid. While teaching the basics of a subject, you have to avoid getting caught up in all the subtleties and problems. Also, the author doesn't really seem to know physics very well, see for example:

>Quantum electrodynamics itself is, however, famously riddled with infinities, and to abolish them requires the further ad hoc procedure of renormalization, which was so distasteful to Paul Dirac that he ceased doing physics altogether.

Renormalization is ad-hoc and distasteful? Somebody clearly doesn't understand it at all! Renormalization is nothing but a consequence that we look at nature at a "low" energy scale, and is perfectly natural.

[Anonymous No.3054667]

yeah yeah, the world is complicated,
get over it faggot

this article is like some kid bitching about how hard his homework is

[Anonymous No.3054671]

>>3054555
Isn't QED relatively new Feyman

[Anonymous No.3054700]

>>3054671
from the next sentence in the article
>Although the theory of renormalization has advanced since those days, many physicists would echo Richard Feynman, one of the technique’s inventors, who called it “hocus-pocus.”

[Anonymous No.3054713]

>An ideal spring oscillates forever, but anyone who has ever watched a real-world spring knows that forever usually lasts just a few seconds. We account for this mathematically by inserting a frictional term into the spring equation and the fix accords well with observations. But the insertion is completely ad hoc, adjustable by hand, and to claim that such a fudge somehow explains the behavior of springs is simple vanity.

lol

[Anonymous No.3054726]

>If Newton’s laws are at the bottom of everything, then one should be able to derive the second law of thermodynamics from Newtonian mechanics, but this has never been satisfactorily accomplished and the incompatibility of the irreversible second law with the other fundamental theories remains perhaps the greatest paradox in all physics.

FUCK

[Anonymous No.3054727]

wat.

This is a stispid story.

Journalist makes straw man: "physicists pretend they know everything". Then proceeds to show physicists don't know everything.

[Grothendieck !Topos4qCwc No.3054735]

>>3054648
WOO! WOO!

[Anonymous No.3054810]

>>3054727
physics is a bastardization of the pursuit of natural law which is everything, so while they never directly claim to know everything they do claim to know the bastardize version of everything.