Disenchanted with Physics Other Sciences?

[lurky]

Darkchild, I don't think there's anything wrong with you for questioning what you've learned. I really think that your issue is that you weren't told early enough that we don't know everything. So now you've gotten to the end of the book (your undergraduate) and you're feeling dissatisfied because the conclusion isn't as thorough as you had hoped. Does that suck? Well, yeah, of course it does. I think it would have helped had your instructors better prepared you for this earlier, but they didn't, so now you have to just learn to accept that we don't yet have all of the pieces of the puzzle and are still stuck with mental constructs. In fact, we will probably never know everything (how could we know if we did?), so mental constructs will probably always exist.

Mental constructs aren't so bad. The reason why you don't see unicorns being invoked in explanations is because those would be more complex than necessary.

 

[JDStupi]

Alright, your doomed to never know. Period. that's the first thing you have to understand. What does us existing in a socio-environmental milieu have to do with anything? It has to do with our limitations, and what your asking is for an explanation that is independant of the limitations of existing in such a manner. Again, your looking for a "View from nowhere", it is the Kantian insight that, neccesarily, anything that you intuit will be limited by the way in which you intuit it. When twofish speaks about mathematics as a language, he isn't saying its the only language, what he is saying however is that different forms of language are used for different modes of explanation, just as we wouldn't explain psychological motivations in terms of equations, it seems to be that, for whatever reason, our limitations make it such that in terms of explanation, however inadequate by your standards, mathematics is our only means of access to such physical phenomena. You also have to get the idea of strict deductive neccessity out of your head. No nothing "necesarrily" says that the mathematics used to describe "charged particles" requires the interpretation of "magnetic field" in the metalanguage we use to evaluate the truth claims of the theory, but what in your world is a necessary truth? Besides mathematical tautologies, what is "neccessary"? Our world, exists in possible explanations and combinations of deductive, inductive, and abductive inferencing and you cannot expect to hold all explanations to the standards of "neccessity".
This isn't an argument. Don't quote me an say "blahblahblahblah" and be so hard-headed, how about you consider what people are saying, I'm not arguing over whether your right or wrong. I'm simply suggesting that, for your own good, you rigorously analyze what you mean by "explanation" "neccessity" "language" "truth" "physical" "reality" and relateds notions. Don't argue with me, argue with yourself. When you shift around the words and say "Something that doesn't pass figments of the imagination off as physical phenomena" ask yourself "What constitutes a "figment of imagination"?" "What is a physical phenomena?" "How would I come to know a physical phenomena?" "What would constitute an explanation of a physical phenomena?" "How is anything explained? What does "explain" mean?". Its quite odd that you ask such questions and are disenchanted with the state of things, but then limit yourself by refusing to try to get to the bottom of the matter and refine your notions.

 

[Klockan3]

Can you explain to me how magnets attract and repulse one another, or how they attract or repulse live wires, without invoking the concept of a magnetic field? I would love to hear it.

We know how electrons and protons behave near each other, how they accelerate etc. This is deduced by observing the acceleration between the particles which is found to depend on the distance and their relative velocity. Magnets are objects which have a macroscopic amount of electrons moving in a uniform way, so even though the effects of the protons/electrons eliminates each other on average if you don't consider movement we will still see that these objects will effect each other. Now from our observation on how moving electrons accelerate each other we can also deduce that the electrons in one magnet will accelerate the electrons in the other magnet and vice versa. In which direction depends on the relative electron currents, if they are aligned they attract otherwise they repel each other.

There, no mention of any abstract concepts at all, just some particles and some observations on how particles behaves. This isn't hard at all, it seems to me that your problem is that you don't understand what people mean with for example magnetic fields.

 

[twofish-quant]

As I've said up-thread, it could just as well be invisible unicorns pushing and pulling magnets together as a magnetic field. It is not "real" in the sense that it is a totally arbitrary construction.

I don't understand how magnetic fields are less "real" than "wind." If you put together a loop of wire and start running and you find that there is a current in the loop of wire, then something is there, isn't it?

It's not arbitrary since you need to come up with numbers that let you calculate how much current there is in a wire.

I also expressed the idea that understanding the basic physical principles of how something works does not require math.

And I think that's impossible. As far as conceptual physics courses, one thing that people taking conceptual physics courses need to be told is that they aren't learning physics. They are getting a taste of what physics is like, but they aren't learning physics, because physics requires numbers and math.

 

[twofish-quant]

I think that way because all sorts of physics concepts can be explained without math.

Not very well. The problem with trouble to explain a concept without math is that in physics, you know something is true because you get 2.1 on the meter, and without math, there's nothing to compare with the number on the meter. Because the observations are mathematical, I just don't see how you can provide a satisfactory explanation without math.

Considering the fact that words are the primary means of communication among humans, especially for complex subjects, while we can live, communicate, etc. just fine with little or no math, there is really no comparison between the two.

There are some areas of human existence where math is unnecessary, but there are areas in which math is essential. Try going to a grocery store and buying bread without math. It can't be done. The person with the bread is going to require that you have $X in cash for Y loaves of bread. "Conceptual understanding" isn't going to help you very much when you try to figure out how much money is in your bank account.

It depends on what one wants to explain. If you are asking about amounts of things, as in your example, of course you need math. If one simply wants to know what happens when a magnet is in the vicinity of a live wire, it's not necessary.

Yes it is, because I want to know if there is 2.1 amps of current going through the wire or 5 amps of current.

 

[twofish-quant]

Backing something up is not the same thing as giving a simple description of how something works. Ever hear of conceptual physics courses?

Yes. I have.

How can they possibly teach anything if math is required to explain every little detail of physics?

They don't teach very much. I don't think that conceptual physics classes teach very much (if any) physics at all.

 

[Shackleford]

Neither will physics if you're looking for the end-all singular answer. All the physical sciences are grounded in observation.

How else would you describe the world? All you will even know in physics is due to observations and that is all you will ever know from it. If you want higher truths than observation then yes, you better look to some other sort of philosophical description of the world. That's all physics really is is the logic involved with observation.

EDIT: This guy's just arguing for the sake of arguing. People keep making the same points and this joker won't accept any of them. I'm calling troll.

Maybe he's Michael Faraday.

 

[Sankaku]

This thread is very interesting to me. I cannot speak for anyone else, but I think the issue with mathematical models in science is that they often describe relationships that have very little analogue in daily life. That makes it hard to replace them with anything else that is familiar. Your example of unicorns doesn't address the point that the math is revealing something about the underlying structure of what is going on. It doesn't do a good job with 'what' (unicorns vs fields) but it does ok with revealing the relationships/processes that are happening.

One view is that math is just the language we are forced to use to discuss areas where our regular language is inadequate. Once you really look at anything in any depth, what we think we actually know dissolves into something much less tangible. Using a mathematical construct seems to be the best we can do when dealing at scales the human mind did not evolve to understand directly.

Is there a better way? Maybe; I hope you find it and can come back and tell us all...

 

[Odysseus]

Darkchild, I thought you would be interested in the fact that classical electrodynamics has been formulated completely in terms of a variational principle that does not invoke any fields. More information http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-lecture.html" . Scroll down until you see the only bit of mathematics on the page (it is a popular lecture) the paragraphs surrounding are relevant.

 

[twofish-quant]

Darkchild, I thought you would be interested in the fact that classical electrodynamics has been formulated completely in terms of a variational principle that does not invoke any fields.

Invoke any fields explicitly.

The variational principle implicitly creates a field :-) :-) :-) Six of one, half dozen of the other.

 

[twofish-quant]

Also if you find out that there are five or six equivalent ways of describing something, there is usually some extremely deep and abstract mathematical reason why.

One theorem is that every symmetry results in a field, so what particle physicists have been looking for for the last several decades is to start with some "obvious" symmetry and then show that they create fields which explain everything.

 

[mal4mac]

Background information: I received my B.S. in Physics with an Astrophysics concentration last month. I was confused and unhappy with what I was learning during my university studies. I've come to realize that I pursued Physics with the expectation of learning how the world worked; what I actually learned about (beyond first year physics or so) were a bunch of metaphors for how the world works (models) and how to do all sorts of calculations with these metaphors. Sometimes, I sit and marvel at all the work I did, all the physics that is being done all over the world, and has been done all throughout time, juxtaposed with the fact that scientists still don't know the answer to "how" with regard to fundamental questions.

... I began to wonder if Earth Science or Planetary Science are more objective-reality-focused than Physics, and if I would find some satisfaction in studying them in graduate school. I know that some of the material will refer to the aspects of Physics that I dislike, but I could be fine with that as long as it is not the case most of the time. I would like some insight about these fields, given the information I've mentioned about my interests and perspective. I'm somewhat inhibited in my ability to research it myself right now, being in a foreign country where I can't read the language well enough to make good use of a library, but I can look up research papers, etc., online if anyone has that sort of suggestion.

This was not easy for me to express, so thanks for taking the time to read it and for any suggestions.

I ended up in the same position as you three decades ago. That led to a variety of jobs in various sciences. You don't get any nearer to "real reality" doing "Planetary science" or whatever. It doesn't really matter which science you take, if you like the actual process of thinking logically/mathematically/programatically then stay in science, just choose whatever job pays best/has the nicest colleagues/isn't too crazy a work environment/short hours. Look for enchantment in Mozart and Dickens and girlfriends. Reading some pop philosophy might help orient you (Bryan Magee, Alain de Botton, ... keep away from Kant and Aristotle though... to much pain...)

 

[drkatzin]

Actually, the magnetic field is very real. The "action at a distance" way of looking at electromagnetic phenomena has been shown to be false: if you have two charge distributions in vacuum, and you change one of them (move charges around), the resulting "information" (i.e. the forces on the other charge distribution) does not immediately reach the other charge distribution. There is a finite transfer time of signals, equal to the speed of light.

So what entity transfers information between the charge distributions? There's no material substance traveling between them, since we're dealing w/ vacuum. The electric and magnetic fields are the information carriers of electromagnetic phenomena: they store energy and transfer momentum.

 

[vtakhist]

1) The most reasonable position seems to be to accept that you are a limited human being...as we all are...and thus we cannot find out some things...ever...such as empirically prove/disprove God...etc.

2) So far...Scientific Method IS THE BEST method of getting consistent results from empirical data...and physics being the most fundamental and rigorous science is the best possible way we have as of now to explain how everything works (be it in terms of models and approximations)

3) Physics more or less accepts on faith (as other sciences) that empirical data can yield knowledge...

BUT all other sciences go even further...they not only accept that on faith...they also accept on faith physics etc...and the more applied you go the more you accept on faith...

4) given your problems, you either can leave physics and go into philosophy (where you can question almost everything including empiricism etc.) etc. or stay here in physics (where you don't question empiricism but get more "real" results)...or maybe go into math. (but it has its own worries)...all other fields will yield to even further disappointment since the further you go from these 3 the more you have to accept on faith

 

[Shackleford]

Also if you find out that there are five or six equivalent ways of describing something, there is usually some extremely deep and abstract mathematical reason why.

I always think this is the coolest thing, explaining something mathematically several different ways.

1) The most reasonable position seems to be to accept that you are a limited human being...as we all are...and thus we cannot find out some things...ever...such as empirically prove/disprove God...etc.

2) So far...Scientific Method IS THE BEST method of getting consistent results from empirical data...and physics being the most fundamental and rigorous science is the best possible way we have as of now to explain how everything works (be it in terms of models and approximations)

3) Physics more or less accepts on faith (as other sciences) that empirical data can yield knowledge...

BUT all other sciences go even further...they not only accept that on faith...they also accept on faith physics etc...and the more applied you go the more you accept on faith...

4) given your problems, you either can leave physics and go into philosophy (where you can question almost everything including empiricism etc.) etc. or stay here in physics (where you don't question empiricism but get more "real" results)...or maybe go into math. (but it has its own worries)...all other fields will yield to even further disappointment since the further you go from these 3 the more you have to accept on faith

Excellent post, IMO.

 

[Daverz]

Background information: I received my B.S. in Physics [...] scientists still don't know the answer to "how" with regard to fundamental questions such as the operation of magnets.

I think we're being played:

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fcking-magnets-how-do-they-work

 

[ZapperZ]

It is safe to say that this thread has meandered way beyond "Academic Guidance".

It is done.

Zz.