Don’t Forget Intuition: The art of doing science
theamericanscholar.org
theamericanscholar.org
knowledge which took hundreds of years to discover is imparted in capsules to students - the history of how knowledge was discovered is likely more important and interesting to learn than knowledge itself...
cases in point: heliocentric theory has a rich and dramatic history, and so does galois theory
Quote from article..
As someone who writes about science history, I have long grumbled about how misleading modern scientific papers are. I understand the need to present scientific findings in a clean, concise way, but the papers also omit all the false starts, blind alleys, broken equipment, and dumb mistakes that beset real scientific research every day. By omitting all the human stuff, the papers fail to explain how science really gets done.
PhD thesis are sometimes good places to look if you want more of the gory details.
Edit: and if you ever take a physics lab in trying to measure the heat capacity of water or speed of light you learn a bunch about how science actually works.
Having personally gone through a couple years of lab classes; no, not really. Lord knows your professors may try but at least in my experience the profundity is lost on students. You get a lovely tour of scientific concensus, but most people see the experiments as being fore-ordained or like a recipe.
To put it more simply university lab classes demonstrate so many things that are true that people sometimes never realize that science is a method for disproving things.
the fact that the earth revolves around the sun is commonly accepted today.. but it took thousands of years of debate to arrive at that discovery.
I can bet that the average high schooler or college student in science will have a difficult time designing experiments to prove the above fact (and for this reason it took so long - as it is completely non-intuitive).
Paper are for findings in more presentable state.
The laws of logic and reasoning rest on axioms which basically rely on the intuition that they are true.
An example of why this matters: string theory. AFAICT It's a field that is built with a clear(ish) intuition and rigorous use of logic, but because it is experimentally unverifiable the field has never really moved past conjecture.
Which come from logic/reasoning which relies on intuition.
Explanations of reasoning and math often appeal to intuition as a shortcut and to connect with the student, but that is not the foundation.
Where does the principle come from?
So I suppose the principle comes from the pragmatism involved with being embodied agents with needs in a hostile environment.
Hence my desire for an intuitive one.
(But if you are curious, the idea is that space is divided into chunks. Crossing chunks or propogating EM/gravitational fields through a chunk causes a delay, which means the particle's inertial frame loses time. And even if particles are traveling at infinite speed inside a chunk, that delay causes an effective speed limit. That's the speed of light. Similarly, there could be other ideas that also "backport" the entire spacetime theory onto quantum.)
Rather, it feels like gravity is special and the chunks of spacetime themselves are carrying information about the gravitational field.
My imagination is odd because it's based on how I would write a distributed game server. (It doesn't make sense to simulate gravity pairs between every single pair of particles. This isn't just slow, it doesn't scale if the universe expands. But it makes sense to precalculate gravity field as a chunked map and then update one chunk at a time.) (You can ask the same about light/EM but light hits only some of the things and can cause complex local interactions at the scale of electron orbits. When gravity changes, it's very macroscopic instead. So I wanted to treat them differently)
In the context of how atoms work without having electrons that lose charge and fall into nuclei, how different atoms absorb / emit different colors/wavelengths of light:
The simplest theory is that they just are this way. Just fix up the existing "codebase" to accommodate for this observed fact. So they just said electrons has discrete energy states and orbits to choose from.
It's literally the simplest way to accommodate the observed fact that electrons do not fall into nuclei.
It led to super complex Maths and predictions about black holes, and seemingly conflicts with general relativity. But, Can you think of anything more intuitive?