Todd Suomela's Library tagged physics →  View Popular, Search in Google

"Which is great when you're in one of the fields that's meant to serve as the grand and inspirational challenge. For the rest of us, though, this is trickle-down science: the best and the brightest get fired up to be rocket scientists, or high-energy particle physicists, and those who aren't quite the best or the brightest, well... they can study condensed matter physics, or something less inspirational. They'll still be an upgrade over the riff-raff who are presumably populating those fields now. You know, the ones motivated by wanting to save the world from cancer, or hunger, or pestilence.

Not only is this kind of insulting to those of us who have chosen to make careers in fields that aren't driven by Big Science, it's not remotely sustainable. If getting people to go into science and engineering is dependent on something as ephemeral as "inspiration," we're forever going to be careening from boom to bust."

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"Its one thing for physicists exploring carbon nanotubes to say they have no use for philosophy. Their work lives or dies by experimental data that can be collected tomorrow. But over the last few decades, cosmology and foundational physics have become dominated by ideas that that appear to take a page from science fiction and, more importantly, remain firmly untethered to data."

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"Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, wrote a book on the physics of how "something can come from nothing," and thought it answered the old philosophical question to that effect. He got lots of praise from other philosophical ignoramuses, and then along came David Albert, a distinguished philosopher of physics at Columbia University (who even has a PhD in physics), who pointed out the confusions in a rather wicked, but as far as I can see apt, review in The New York Times. "

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"Since its inception in the early part of the 20th century, the theory of quantum mechanics has consistently baffled many of the great physicists of our time. But while the ideas of quantum physics are challenging and notoriously weird, they seem to capture the public imagination and hold an enduring appeal. Evidence of this comes in part from the numerous popular-science books that have been written on the topic over the years. This episode in the Physics World books podcast series looks at the popularity of quantum mechanics in science writing"

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"This might seem like a worthy aspiration. Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method — known as hypothetico-deductivism — then in the minds of many, it’s not scientific."

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"In their recently published book A Model Discipline: Political Science and the Logic of Representations (Oxford University Press), Clarke and Primo delve into the ramifications of this "physics envy" for political science. In their quest to emulate the hard sciences, Clarke and Primo write, political scientists have placed far too much emphasis on model testing, resulting in the widespread view "that theoretical models must be tested to be of value and that the ultimate goal of empirical analysis is theory testing."
A Model Discipline argues that the logic behind this stance is hopelessly flawed, while its impacts have been detrimental to political science in a variety of ways."

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A gedankenexperiment on "So here we go: the best argument I can think of for why research on string theory is a waste of time."

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"We have this pet physicist and.. something's wrong. It keeps babbling about linguistics and neurology and climate science."

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Good example for the "illusion of explanatory depth"

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The OSP Collection provides curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling. Computational physics and computer modeling provide students with new ways to understand, describe, explain, and predict physical phenomena.

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Link to PDF preprint.

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"I’ve posted to YouTube a series of 22 short videos giving an introduction to quantum computing. Here’s the first video:

Below I list the remaining 21 videos, which cover subjects including the basic model of quantum computing, entanglement, superdense coding, and quantum teleportation.

To work through the videos you need to be comfortable with basic linear algebra, and with assimilating new mathematical terminology. If you’re not, working through the videos will be arduous at best! Apart from that background, the main prerequisite is determination, and the willingness to work more than once over material you don’t fully understand."

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