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Comment by OldGuyInTheClub | Hacker News Reader

Thought this Oppenheimer anecdote may amuse the HN contingent.

"Oppenheimer obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in March 1927 at age 23, supervised by Max Born.[28][29] After the oral exam, James Franck, the professor administering, reportedly said, "I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me."[30] "

Franck had won the Nobel two years earlier.

Sources: [Refs] quoted directly from Wikipedia article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer

[30] from Wikipedia: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,853... --> p.4

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So, one of my favourite stories is Witggenstein's Phd viva. He submitted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as his PhD thesis.

Apparently on the way into his viva he said to Bertrand Russel "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it.".[0] He passed with flying colours.

(Note: I tried to google and didn't find a primary source, but post saying the same thing I remembered, so possible citation needed here)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910633

I have tried to read the Tractatus a couple of times and whiffed majorly. I think Wittgestein foresaw Powerpoint culture and created a (the only?) major philosophical work[0] consisting of just bullet points.

[0] True, I didn't understand it but it clearly has had an impact!

My favorite? When Von Neumann(an Austrian aristocrat) walked into his oral exam, Hilbert asked another of the admistrators who his tailor was.

> Von Neumann(an Austrian aristocrat)

Usually Von Neumann is thought to be Hungarian. Born in Budapest, which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Also not really an aristocrat, more like an upper-middle class banker's family. The "von ..." was more of a faux title, although his family did have an honorary nobility title (a different one) received a few decades before.

In europe -every upstart family, at some point tried to get the "von und zu","van", "de" only exemption from this is the english aristocracy.. were you glue a "lord" or "lady" in front of the name, instead of a addition bewetween name and surname.

Born János Neumann

Other reference to Oppenheimer:

James Franck, who had emigrated to the US, advocated to not use the Atomic bomb against Japan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franck_Report

I keep making this mistake. I almost asked "why philosophy, didn't he study physics?"

That does make me wonder: why DOES the qualification/position/status name mention only philosophy?

I don't ask questions, I just use mine for what it's worth!: Not much and decreasing by the day. (Also not in math)

Philosophy used to include all of science, up until "Natural Philosophy" got big enough to separate out on its own.

The term philosophy is used in the original Greek sense, "love of knowledge". As opposed to, Wikipedia tells me: theology, medicine and law. I guess it also has something to do with philosophy in the early sense of the word, before natural philosophy branched off and became what we today call the sciences.

Partially, it’s tradition at this point, but it’s also worth pointing out that a PhD isn’t the only doctorate, see e.g. DBA, EdD, JD, MD, etc.

And some universities still award a DPhil rather than a PhD (in the UK I believe Oxford and Sussex do - I have an Oxford DPhil and I always have the very mild quandary of whether to call it a PhD or DPhil - everybody knows what the former is and it is equivalent, but I feel like I am being inaccurate if I call it that!)

The "philosophy" in PhD refers to philosophy/wisdom in general (philos=love, sophia=wisdom) not the specific academic discipline.

What we today call science was once called natural philosophy. Philosophy was simply the systematic study of the world, including physics, logic, and math, as opposed to theology or learning an applied professional trade such as medicine, law, or architecture.

The terms we use to differentiate fields of study are still shifting. Nobody uses the term "naturalist" anymore, at least not to refer to a scholarly field. There's often a huge overlap between math and various other fields. I'm not sure the recent explosion in degree names is any better than using Ph.D. It's tempting to suggest that fields like Art History and English Literature should be differentiated from [modern] Physics, but ideally scholars in all those fields should be (and often are) using many of the same analytical techniques. And realistically, I doubt usage of a shared signifier, Ph.D, is causing any consequential confusion. Arguably, as specialization increases the value of using Ph.D increases--it general implies someone has attained the highest credential in their field of study, whatever the field.

Early in the tradition of thinking, practitioners of thinking were called philosophers. In those times there was no distinction between the physics of the world and of the mind, physics and metaphysics were one in the same. As philosophy evolved, new branches became distinct, mathematics, physics, and later chemistry and others.

The basis of all of these branches of the sciences owe their place to the work done by the early thinkers who established the ways of knowing. It is in the method of knowing that the highest degree in academic sciences is a Doctor of Philosophy. By obtaining the degree you have proven you are capable of establishing "knowing". Which is to say, you can reason.

  > Which is to say, you can reason.

I find this sentence a very concise phrasing for how I appreciate those with a degree vs. those without. I personally do not have a degree, but I far prefer working with people who do - simply because I can trust that they can reason.

Philosophy is the study of everything that is not well understood or is difficult to understand, even the study of study itself. A good way to think of it is, "philosophy exists only in the gaps", the gaps in our understanding. What is the nature of matter, can you take clay and keep dividing it in half and in half? When we didn't know the answer, only speculated about it, it was philosophy. Now that we know the answer, it's physics. But unknown answers in physics are still considered philosophy, such as whether or what would it mean if time can run backward.

This implies philosophy and philosophers will disappear once we know everything, which could by some be considered one of the rewards of this quest for truth.

BTW, many institutions today offer the ScD degree, doctor of science; it is generally equivalent to a PhD, though in some places it can be considered "higher"

Because academics love to cling to outdated and today factually incorrect terminology, while arrogantly berating the general public when they do the same.

"Actually, it's not called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis anymore. The preferred term is 'linguistic relativity' now."

... while you keep using titles that have been nonsensical for 200 years. Got it.

Academia is 99% power games. The emperor wears no clothes.

The preferred term for the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is "uninformed nonsense mostly due to Whorf which really shouldn't have Sapir's name attached to it".

PhD is a license to teach (i.e. doctor) philosophy. Specifically, in "science" fields, natural philosophy.

Natural philosophy was the original (and i think better) name for science, especially physics. It was understood to be an important subbranch of philosophy.

I think its better name because it elucidates an important epistemological difference: science is a method, not knowledge. I learn science when I learn about experimental design. Im not learning science when I learn about evolution; rather Im learning a theory, very likely to be true, that is almost impossible to put under scrutiny using the scientific method.

The Pythagorean theorem has no science and is 100% true. In fluids, Bernoulli devised experiments to demonstrate to his calculus illiterate colleagues what he had already mathematically proven.

Science is a bad term.

Apparently it is also a license for your brother in law to brag about having a PhD in economics, despite not being able to hold a job for more than 2 years and currently working as a manager at a pest control company after being laid off from his last job.

I can imagine that many great academics might have difficulties 'holding a job'. A PhD is certainly something to be proud of, just as running a marathon, raising a great child or having a great corporate career.

This is hilarious. Whereas I have to say, when holding a job means doing what other people want you to do, well, which person of high intelligence would be interested in that?

Physics was also philosophy for eons in that theories were on par with hard knowledge about the gods and mermaids.

Most early physic had surprisingly little explanatory or experimental connection to the actual physical world.

But it often made up for that with a solid grounding in popular mythology and the produce of some extraordinary imaginations.

You know, like philosophy!

Thats a gross mischaracterization of the ancients.

Anyway, those crazies came up with atomistic theory to explain silly myths.... and ended up explaining phase change as an emergent phenomenon.

You are overlooking a lot. Then and today.

The ancients were not just the famous Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Indian and Chinese philosophers, who made progress in reasoning.

Human's across every culture have spun creative explanations for natural phenomena, going back as far as we have any records.

- Why does it rain? How can we make it rain?

- What are the planets? What do their cycles and alignments mean?

- What is an illness? How do we avoid it? Cure it?

Even those philosophers were not immune to this kind of thinking.

Non/Pre-scientific answers to unanswerable questions gave satisfied people’s need for order and gave them hope.

Today, many people still take such answers seriously where there is no science (afterlife, cosmic justice, ...), and even where there is (astrology, crystals, etc.)

Holy cow, I had not until today realized that "doctor" comes from "docere" (to teach). Thanks for enlightening me!

Which makes you wonder why a medical doctor is called that?

For the same reason social science is called science. When words start to become prestigious many will attach that word to what they do.

Social science is science. In what way is it not?

Lack of reproducibility results for one.

That's a problem in all the sciences right now: https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a

Because doctor comes from the passive doctus ('having been taught', i.e. learned) rather than the active docens ('teaching, instructing').

Not really. Doctor means "teacher" in classical Latin.

Good point. English has both actor (=someone who acts) and agent (=someone who acts) from agere = to act, and both doctor (=someone who teaches) and docent (=someone who teaches) from docere = to teach.

Because physicians are licensed to teach the practice of medicine.

that's the root of the word. The original four-wise distinction seems to have been Doctor of Medicine/Law/Natural Phylosophy/Theology. Just different kinds of knowledgeable people.

Interestingly enough I just realized in Italian there is an old word, "dotto" that literally would mean "someone who has been taught" but concretely is used in the sense of well educated, knowledgeable, wise, cultured.

Bologna, the home of the first university, has the nickname "la Dotta", i.e. the educated one.

> In fluids, Bernoulli devised experiments to demonstrate to his calculus illiterate colleagues what he had already mathematically proven.

Maybe I misunderstood you, but I have the feeling you're downplaying the importance of experiments in Physics. Once you mathematically prove something, you proved that a statement is true when given a certain set of axioms. This is enough in Mathematics, like your example of the Pythagorean theorem, but it isn't in Physics. The reason being that proving something Mathematically consistent isn't enough to prove that it reflects what happens in the real world. A famous example in pop science of this is string theory.

I also have some doubts about what you say regarding evolution theory, but I'm not familiar whit how biologists verified it. Maybe every time a new fossil is found we can consider it as an experiment that can add a data point in favor or against the theory?

Im about to jump in the shower, son cant go inti detail. Just that the best theories in physics, our best foundations, were not made by an incremental tic-toc theory-experiment cycle. There were bursts of genius that eventually got proven.

Im reading Truesdell's (America's greatest 20th century physicist?) book now where he goes through the history of fluid mechanics and the paucity of experiments. If I remember ill send you the reference

Truesdell is amazing, I like this quote:

"The computer: ruin of science and threat to mankind”

https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/~ball/Miscelleaneous%20Article...

He nailed it for computers

"Experience, Theory and Experiment" from 1955 as found in "An Idiot's Fugitive Essay on Science" by Truesdell.

Bloody brilliant. 70 years ago he foresaw the problems of modern science.

> Im not learning science when I learn about evolution; rather Im learning a theory, very likely to be true, that is almost impossible to put under scrutiny using the scientific method.

the very definition of a "theory" in the scientific sense of the word (e.g. "theory of evolution") includes the ability to test it using the scientific method.

the wikipedia page goes into great detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory

and this is a good brief explanation: https://web.archive.org/web/20170709065046/http://science.ke...

Indeed.

Jumping to specifics, Evolution Theory is relatively easy to demonstrate on short time scales of under a year with fruit flies, and can also be demonstrated on longer timescales of five, ten, thirty years given patience .. with ongoing field observations of some two centuries now in various locations.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/fruit-flies-evolv...

It wasn't a hit on evolution, I specifically stated that it is as true as anything lacking a mathematical proof can be.

And yes, I know about little bugs changing color and bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics.

But, strictly speaking, that isnt what we're taught is "science" in 10th grade, is it? That's really an observation of what we cannot control fitting nicely into our theories.

The embarrassing thing about evolution is that biologists keep having to tweek it in ways that are bewildering if evolution is (I think better) understood as information theory. For example, why did biologists reject horizontal gene transfer?

Anyway the whole field is sitting atop of an ignored quantity-quality emergent behavior which is also the most interesting question.

Some of your points are very curious. Biologists did not reject horizontal gene transfer. Or at any rate it has been part of the canon for pretty much the last 60 years which is essentially forever in biology. (The mechanisms for heredity, i.e. DNA were only discovered in the early 1950s). Besides, scientists are always "tweaking" theories as you put it. More precisely, a fruitful and productive scientific program leads to more and more discovers and elaborations that have to be accomodated. Look at the changes in the Standard Model in particle physics. The current controversy is whether and why the Standard Model is no longer being "tweaked". In other words, some physicist wonder whether current research is no longer yielding discoveries that allow advances and hences changes or elaborations to the Standard Model.

Why specifically in science.

PhD is the degree you usually get at that level for English, Classics, Economics, Histrory etc..

Some Universities use DPhil (Oxford) for all these but I know of no other degree at that level except for those two (MD is effectively lower and DSc is usually some form of honourary degree and I am not certain what LLD is)

Because my post was wordy enough as it was and the OP was asking about a physics degree. I was going to be more specific, but it was late, I was tiered and.... meh

MIT seems to offer an ScD as an alternative to the PhD in some fields.

https://oge.mit.edu/graduate-admissions/programs/doctoral-de...

Historically a Masters degree was a license to teach, hence its name.

In the medieval university system, there were four fields of knowledge: medicine (MD), law (Juris Doctor, or JD), theology (ThD), or philosophy (PhD).

In the centuries since, new kinds of knowledge were discovered, but they generally got squeezed in as sub-categories of philosophy, so when you specialise in them, you get a PhD.

He took the doctorate degree in Europe. He gained a PhD in Physics.

"Doctor of Philosophy" (PhD): a doctorate in just about any subject except law or medicine.

"Doctor of Letters" (D.Lit.): a doctorate in Law.

"Doctor of Medicine" (D.Med.): a doctorate in medicine.

Philosophy literally means the love to knowledge, and was (in some way still is) the father/mother of all subjects we today call science. Before "sub-genres" like Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology were large enough to warrant their own subjects, they were all just part of philosophy. Today, we speak of philosophy if we mean topics that are not part of these subjects, altough I feel a fair argument could be made that they could be still considered part of philosophy. The name just is something left of that time.

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