Are science jokes fundamentally accurate?

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36 replies · 22K views
hey how bout looking at things this way, what all of them scientist and mathematicians
be eating if there aint no farmers. U all'd starve. How bout a hand for them farmers.Everyones got their thing to do . RESPECT.
 
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I have respect for everyone and grateful that different people do different things. But we don't live in a Communist society. I was just curious about the different difficulty levels of the different disciplines. When I say one subject is more difficult than another, I mean what the general population on average feels when learning the subject. For example, I and many people I know would agree that learning theoretical chemistry is easier than learning theoretical physics. What I want to know is do most people feel pure math or theoretical physics is harder to learn? Personally, I feel pure math is harder but I have only done first year level subjects and do not know many people who have done these two disciplines so your input would be appreciated.
 
pivoxa15 said:
Personally, I feel pure math is harder but I have only done first year level subjects and do not know many people who have done these two disciplines so your input would be appreciated.

The difficulty of learning something is dependent on your skills. It's also not the same question that you were asking, since learning something at an elementary level is entirely different from being a genius in the field. Pure math is certainly more abstract than theoretical physics, but there are some ways in which this makes things easier, since you don't have to constantly be worrying about the physical implications of your derivations. As BicycleTree pointed out, mathematical derivations have one eternal answer and you can follow a definite set of rules to reach that answer. In theoretical physics, it's not always so straightforward. Every mathematical operation is supposed to represent something in the real world and we're not always sure which rules the real world is going to obey. For example, in a paper I was discussing recently, the core issue was whether or not a particular pair of tensors can be said to commute. It's not really a mathematical issue, since whatever the answer may be, we will have no problems deriving a solution. The question is fundamentally a physical one. What assumptions about the real world can we make in doing our derivation?

I'm not saying theoretical physics is more difficult, I'm just saying things aren't as black and white as you're trying to make them.
 
pivoxa15 said:
What I want to know is do most people feel pure math or theoretical physics is harder to learn?
I thought you wanted to know if science jokes were fundamentally accurate. I keep trying to address your original quetion, and you keep ignoring me as if you never asked it. What gives?
 
pivoxa15 said:
For example, I and many people I know would agree that learning theoretical chemistry is easier than learning theoretical physics. What I want to know is do most people feel pure math or theoretical physics is harder to learn? Personally, I feel pure math is harder but I have only done first year level subjects and do not know many people who have done these two disciplines so your input would be appreciated.

The answer is really still the same. It depends. For the person who loves math and will likely become a mathematician, math might be the easiest subject for them; there are rules to follow and definite answers at which they will arrive. But, ask that mathematician to write a poem or learn molecular biology, and they will not be good at that.

kaos said:
hey how bout looking at things this way, what all of them scientist and mathematicians
be eating if there aint no farmers. U all'd starve. How bout a hand for them farmers.Everyones got their thing to do . RESPECT.

:smile: I just got this picture in my mind of watching mathematicians trying to herd cattle. :smile: "If we assume all cattle are points with the following Cartesian coordinates on the field..." :-p
 
I think that if you want to be able to bluff your way in subjects other than your own, then its probably best to start off as a mathematical physicist. "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" is full of examples of how Richard Feynman managed to succeed in other fields (and how he was eventually 'found out'). Maybe that was just the way he was, but I don't think that if he had started with a career as a drummer then he would have been able to take up theoretical physics as easily as the other way around.