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Comment by mgalka | Hacker News Reader

Same here. It's actually a really good post!

Regarding his comment about hearing from amateurs who think they've solved the world, that is something I've heard from a lot of physics professors, that they get a lot of emails with crazy stuff like this: http://i.imgur.com/QTt6ZTq.gif

Why does that happen in physics and not chemistry, bio, econ, comsci or any other subject?

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It happens in math and theoretical CS all the time. Proofs of P != NP (or the opposite!) are particularly popular.

In applied CS, instead of emailing professors people just post their stuff on the internet. Sometimes it gets wildly popular. How do you think PHP came around?

Everyone's an armchair economist so I wouldn't count econ out.

I think that math/physics are more accessible to the layman. I know where to go if I want to get deeper into this subject.

I really don't know how to start becoming an amateur chemist or biologist. I've wanted to learn more about synthetic biology and gene therapy, but it's not as simple as cracking open a math book or going to a dev bootcamp. I wish these resources existed though! My best guess is because exploring chem and bio have bigger resource requirements like lab space.

Biology, and I Assume chemistry as well, are in practice all about lore; the peculiarities of particular entities are where the action is & theory is a relatively small thing that falls out of that. So not only do you need a lab to do experiments, you need to be hanging around a lab to pick up all this disjointed lore.

I think math/physics are less accessible to the layperson, but more subject to Dunning-Kruger. There are so many popular accounts of quantum this and string that in the media that a lot of the population seems to feel qualified to hold an opinion on anything quantum-y. ("It's on TV" => "I'm encouraged to have an opinion about it.")

In reality it's literally impossible for most people to imagine how hard the math is - because an undergrad physics or engineering degree is barely even a warm-up for it.

I'd love to see a TV show that made it clear just how challenging the math is without reducing it to the usual storytelling.

Popularisation can be great, but maybe it would be good to get a realistic appreciation for the raw version into the public narrative.

Oh it happens all the time in econ - although one could argue that economics at the moment does deserve some of it. You regularly get emails and even the occasional book, linking to yet another youtube misconception of how money, banking and the economy work. I usually reply pointing out the time at which the first provable mistake is made, and I've yet to get over 5 minutes. They do get extra points for being vaguely anti-semitic before that point.

As a former professor it does happen in biology. Whenever some crazy person would ring the switchboard in the biology area they would pass it on to me - I am not sure why, maybe it was because I was relatively patient with the people who called. Lots of interesting conversation, but little science.

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