When physics meets biology: a less known Feynman
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
For a CS graduate, it's like learning everything there is about Oracle 9i. For years. By heart. Not even about databases in general, you learn the basics of course, but then you spend most of your time learning by heart every command and every setting of Oracle 9i.
I'm sure it makes you an efficient doctor within the given system, and when trying to solve some example cases there sure is value in knowing pathways (real ones, e.g. neurological ones - where is the damage if the patient feels this and does not feel any of that?, as well as biochemical ones, but also organizational stuff like various ways invented to categorize broken bones, e.g. http://www.thieme.com/media/samples/pubid1252333231.pdf). Quite frankly, I find most of it a waste of time.
Right now I'm re-taking edX "Principles of Biochemistry" (https://www.edx.org/course/principles-biochemistry-harvardx-...), and while it's a lot of fun I also feel it's quite a bit of a waste: From part III on it feels more and more useless. The course is done very well, and every bit is interesting, but how - WHY - am I supposed to learn soooo many paths in such great detail? What's the point? If I need it I can always look it up! No wonder that while there are several "Hello I'm new here, excited to start this course" messages in the forum every day there are only a handful of forum messages for the later sections of the course - after many months of running. I suspect >90% of people never get past part 3 (of 5). Because the brain just does not see the point of all this rote learning. If there was a larger project as context, a problem to solve! But just "here learn this" for no other reason than "it's interesting" (so are a trillion other pieces of information!!)... it does not work very well.
Learning needs both a PUSH and a PULL. The teaching is mostly about push(ing knowledge into brains), but where is the pull (reasons other than abstract "you need to know")? Brain have their own ways of detecting actual need, and that comes from having to solve actual problems, not from being told "this is important". And learning millions of facts when you don't need them but know you can always learn them/look them up quickly at any time when you do actually need them is soooo demotivating.
Medicine is basically all rote memorization, from pre-Med to the MCAT. It makes sense to select for doctors who are good at it, because they need to have a quickly queryable, but wide breadth of knowledge in their head at all times.
Personally I’m happy to know that my doctor is able to memorize and collate so much information. But I do worry that the way he learns may also restrict his creativity and problem solving.
Perhaps as AI moves into medicine, doctors won’t need to rely so much on their own memorization, and can focus their efforts on problem solving.
I tend to joke that if a doctor discovered a keyboard he would name it a negra quadrodepressus-hectomatrix. Accurate.. and semantically useless. That's how you name things when you have no clue about it's function.
And medicine likes its superbly tough anatomical projection/cut of internals. Honestly I find it's a miracle how doctors can look at organs in every angle and still find their way (same for radiologists).
Coming from CS with a taste for multistage compilation and the likes, I find no beauty in anatomy.. I need a little more principles and less description.
Here is a link to example patient cases, which may help to see what kind of knowledge is useful. I was not trying to say it is all useless, when I had to solve sample cases e.g. in Medical Neuroscience (Coursera, huge course, great teacher) it sure helps to know the major pathways, and it would take too much time to have to look them up when the patient is in front of you.
http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/collection/results.as...
Having taught many med students, I say this attitude would have been a good start towards being a great doctor.
It's very useful to be capable to do that quickly if you can recall it off the top of your head, as you'd be able to more fluidly connect the information into the argument without all that task switching overhead from going back to Google every couple minutes.
Let alone the issue of the information needing to be available in the first place! How would you know what you don't know? Wouldn't you be a lot less likely to forget if you memorized?
I find medical textbooks have significantly improved over the years at their capacity for organizing their finds both functionally and hierarchically. But we can't really put these findings in terms of their compiler, the laws of physics; you don't get unity except by association of the lower level facts with their referrers.
Additionally, discovery in the modern medical field cycles from inductive to abductive to deductive reasoning ad nauseam, in particular by associating diseases together from common molecular components. Your brain will be incapable of having these insights spontaneously without having them internally to percolate.
This is a nonsensical point of view for two reasons. People in areas of their expertise tend to know a lot in that area off the top of their head because they have encountered this stuff so much that it has become memorized. That memorized knowledge comes from experience not a memorization exercise. It’s also nonsensical because if you didn’t have a core set of knowledge memorized in your area of expertise and instead relied on spending 15 minutes looking up each fact necessary to understand a given situation you’d end up wasting your whole day just trying to understand the meaning of the problem.
Besides, I think most muscle names are literally just derived from their position on the body and their movement range, so their name and their function are closely linked.
I know 10 street names in my city. The rest, I look up.
Well, I used to, now I use the GPS.
Note that I do think you are more efficient if you know the street names and where they are.
But I also do think the time and energy requires to learn 100 street names and position in my city can be better used for something else.
Feynman's criticism shows an ignorance on his part.
> What if you were a cop? Would you criticize a cop who has learned the streets?
I would appreciate cops learning anything, but given they got a GPS and older colleagues knowing the streets name by habit, I'd prefer they spend time learning the law. The names will come naturally with practice.
> Shouldn’t a biologist who is at a talk about felines understand the biology of felines without looking it up in a book?
See that's the problem here. You assume you can't know the biology of felines without knowing all the names of all muscle by heart.
It's like saying I can't understand a program if I don't know all the functions of it's API. And while after years of programming I know a lot of things without needing to look them up, I never learned nor will learn any listing by heart. It's a waste of my time. I need to understand algo, complexity, interractions. Names are just an interface, useful, but not required for modeling.
Same things for you biologist. He must understand the interractions between the organs, the chemistry, the musculo-skeletic chain. Naming all the muscle is just a bonus, and now that we have books and computers, it's not a priority anymore.
Does knowing stuff by heart makes you more efficient ? Does it make you a better pro ? Yes, but only if the more important stuff are understood.
And if you are a student, mindlessly learning all names is completly a waste of time. Espacially since they are going to forget most of it after graduation, and learn it back again on the way.
I’ll take a cop who knows the streets over one who has to look up on GPS. Cops chasing a suspect have report on their progress so that backup can reach them. What do you think they’ll do? Pause every 20 seconds and look up GPS coordinates?
Feynman's critique was born of ignorance. He criticizes people for knowing the parts of the cat. In the lecture they criticize him for drawing the map of the cat. They know this already. Feynman does not. He is not at their level and instead of admitting this he makes an ignorant quip.
Virtually all knowledge is an easy internet search these days. This has not diminished the need to know, have memorized, terminology.
Let S be an infinite dimensional ring extension of R with R a commutative Noetherian ring with identity. Under what conditions is S flat as an R-module?
If someone gives a talk on commutative ring theory and the above is the topic they best not waste everyone’s time by looking up the meaning of each word and writing it on the board. Such a person exposes that they aren’t learned enough in the field to be giving a talk.
There are also dozens of constants involved that are possibly a better analog, very few of which end up memorized.
You have missed the point of my comment. Do you think Feynman lacked a vast amount of physics knowledge that he memorized (to use his phrasing)? Part of acquiring expertise in any area is the fact that you end up storing lots of information about that area so that you don’t need to look up every little detail or fact.
If you are going to have a serious discussion with biologists about cell processes you need to have lots of knowledge, names, etc. at the ready. Can't go looking up every little thing as you go along. It would be impossible communicate if you did that.
Feynman was being a jerk with that comment. His dismissiveness reminds me of comment that a well respected mathematician once made. “Quantumn mechanics is just such and such theory in dimesion 1.” Only ignorance allows one to hold such a belief.
Well, quantum mechanics is "just" 0+1 quantum field theory which is actually a good insight and not at all dismissive.
Is commutative algebra just a branch of set of theory? Are set theorists generally equipped to understand research papers on Galois Cohomology? No. Set theory is used in these areas but to suggest that these areas "are just aspects of set theory" is not all insightful.
This not at all the same. QM is a special case of QFT.
> To say that theoretical quantumn mechanics is just a small branch of mathematics is ignorance.
It’s not. That statement is objectively true.
> It is not insightful at all.
It is.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectivene...
> Is commutative algebra just a branch of set of theory? Are set theorists generally equipped to understand research papers on Galois Cohomology? No. Set theory is used in these areas but to suggest that these areas "are just aspects of set theory" is not all insightful.
Intersection (overlap) is not the same as containment, so I have no idea why you’re bringing this up.
Sets are one way (among others) to encode such mathematical structures. This doesn’t mean these structures are sets. For example, is the empty set an element of pi? This question is meaningless because the answer would have to depend on the encoding being used, and not on the properties of pi itself. It’s imposing additional structure above and beyond that of the mathematical structure in question.
See here for more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16080027.
No. It is a set together with additional structure. Without this additional structure you just have a set, not a ring.
> So is a group.
Again, no. It is a set together with additional structure.
Note: The collection of all groups is not even a set!
Biology is immeasurably harder than physics, the systems so much more complex and opaque and non amenable to fundamental explanation. Rote memorisation is a must.
Memorizing large numbers of facts give way to understanding and intuition in my experience. It’s quite similar to how a chess player’s experience regarding strategy starts out by exhaustively enumerating potential futures and eventually turns into an intuitive understanding of future plays and how training a neural network leads to a high dimensional manifold representation of a concept.
I will say that I'm skeptical of a lot of the work done in biology in relation to networks and complexity. It's often either done by those without sufficient mathematical background (and, typically, wholly statistically invalid) or a bunch of hand-wavy, feel-good nonsense for a sexy tagline by those who should know better.
Better work is done by researchers in complexity who analyze biological systems.
Statements of this form are essentially always false: basically everything has the same difficulty because the standards for what constitutes progress in a field are set according to what the people working in it can do on average.
It's easy to write down what you thought of Infinite Jest, but in order to achieve any special success as a critic you're going to have to beat out everybody else that's doing the same thing. That makes it very hard. Likewise in an alternate universe where physics was easy, the standards for how much you had to say in a paper would rise until the average paper was about as substantial as it is now.
For example, in physics they require p < 3e-7 for a discovery. While in biology it is p < 0.05 and sometimes even p < .1 is allowed.
If there is a lot of data they would have too many "discoveries" (it would seem too easy) so they need a more stringent threshold. If the data is very expensive they would have too few "discoveries" so the threshold gets relaxed.
A successful critic isn't a critic, they're an author that writes for whoever is making them successful. So the critic at the top of academia would be the best at writing criticims that people understood: no garuntee of understanding the most, but that's still a skill that, say, Feynman would find it hard to replicate. The heirarchal nature of almost everything garuntees that there will always be "the best," and that they will be hard to beat, regardless of how much it means in the grand scheme of things. Finally, the scarcity of grant money means that participating in any field means beating the best: a regulatory effect that's at the center of the discussion.
While she may have been dead wrong on that one, i'm definitely glad I don't have to rely on looking up / deriving the basics for every domain.
They didn't know a map of the cat, they knew a map of mammals. Evolution is really cool that way. Also perhaps it was easy to catch up because it wasn't that much knowledge.
Feynman no doubt did some interesting work in Physics. But the work discussed here doesn’t appear to be particularly distinguished. It does not follow that someone did interesting work on X therefore everything they did must be valuable and interesting.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that individuals are a complex mixture of good and bad. And that there’s a danger that an individual who has done interesting work in one area is seen as a universal genius, and an ideal to be emulated. This unfortunately is not the case.
[1] https://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/sexist-feynman-... for example...
The work Feynman did in Biology that’s discussed here doesn’t seem to be particularly ground breaking, or interesting. It feels like it’s only being treated as such because Feynman did interesting work in other areas and is somewhat idolized for this.
Probably not, but I don't think being interested in an individual necessarily means idolizing them. In fact, sometimes the actions that we consider abhorrent is what makes them interesting. That's not the case here, but still, I think there's potential value in studying how a very good physicist approached a foreign subject matter.
The work discussed in the paper, is not particularly interesting in isolation.
Reading that excerpt, I got the sense he was writing from the perspective of his past-self, in an almost self-deprecating way. He’s citing that incident of an extreme example of how literally he would follow instructions. By choosing it as an extreme example, he’s effectively acknowledging that the attitude was disrespectful / wrong.
Granted I haven’t read the whole book, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some crucial context missing from those excerpts.
Feynman did, after all, write the words himself.
What I’m saying, is that it’s unwise to idolize people because of their work in one area and then elevate (or more worryingly emulate) there work in other areas.
Like his treatment of women, Feynman’s work in Biology is not really very interesting. It wouldn’t stand up on its own merits... the only reason to talk about it is if you treat Feynman as some kind of Hero/ideal. Feynman is not really a wonderful person to idolize (not that anybody is)...
> "Just as we’re coming out of the bar, here comes Ann, running across Route 66 toward me. She puts her arm in mine, and says, “Come on, let’s go over to my place.”"
the other with
> "We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, “Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?”
> “Yes.”"
These interactions seem like voluntary, enthusiastic consent by rational adults. Maybe I'm seeing a contradiction where there is none, but if a woman who left and never had any need to see him again ran back to initiate physical interaction and invite him to her place, is it possible she knew more about the situation than you and didn't consider his behavior quite bad?
There are other allegations [1]. But that isn’t the central point really, the point is, why idolize someone who did some good work in one area and expect everything they do to be a work of genius? He was imperfect (or are you arguing otherwise?) his work in Biology is not very interesting...
[1] https://galileospendulum.org/2014/07/13/the-problem-of-richa...