Lay people answering complicated questions.

  • Thread starter lauchlan
  • Start date
In summary: That is kind of what i am getting at.In summary, the conversation discusses the possibility and potential benefits of posing complicated physics problems in simple ways to lay people and children with little to no knowledge of the subject. The speaker suggests that this could potentially lead to a breakthrough or profound idea, but also acknowledges the challenges and limitations of this approach. They also mention the role of textbook writers and the possibility that current boundaries in physics may not be the true limitations. However, the conversation also highlights the difficulty of verifying and implementing new ideas, particularly from those without a strong background in physics.
  • #1
lauchlan
5
0
Do you guys think it is possible and worthwhile to pose complicated physics problems in simple ways to lay people and children with little or no knowledge of the subject and see what answers they come up with.


I will use an example to explain what i mean.

If you told people to make an equation from various concepts. If you gave them energy, velocity, mass, volume, light speed and maybe a few others and you gave this to a few million people, how long would it be before one of them came up with E=MC2?


I know this is a massive stretch but i somehow think that unlearned people will not be thinking about the things that "won't" work and even though 99.9% will spit out pure garbage, maybe that tiny fraction could stumble upon something profound, possibly without even knowing what they have done. It is clear to me how easily this question could be blown completely out of proportion and argued down to the point of ridicule, but i pose it nonetheless.


It does seem that within many fields of study, people are hindered by the textbook writers in that the most knowledgeable people seem to create the confines within which other people in the filed are to work if they want to be taken seriously. I'm not saying this is entirely a bad thing, but there must exist the possibility that these confines are not the true boundaries. Unlearned people won't care about the boundaries or about making stupid mistakes because ultimately nobody is going to call them incompetent .

Would be great to hear what you guys think about this.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
  • #3
People are not monkeys though and there will be some logic, however uninformed, behind their ideas. So their answer would be a lot less random.

I wouldn't filter the garbage because i don't know anything about physics, but maybe somebody who knows a bit might see something interesting amongst the rubble. That is kind of what i am getting at.
 
  • #4
lauchlan said:
Do you guys think it is possible and worthwhile to pose complicated physics problems in simple ways to lay people and children with little or no knowledge of the subject and see what answers they come up with. I will use an example to explain what i mean.

If you told people to make an equation from various concepts. If you gave them energy, velocity, mass, volume, light speed and maybe a few others and you gave this to a few million people, how long would it be before one of them came up with E=MC2?I know this is a massive stretch but i somehow think that unlearned people will not be thinking about the things that "won't" work and even though 99.9% will spit out pure garbage, maybe that tiny fraction could stumble upon something profound, possibly without even knowing what they have done. It is clear to me how easily this question could be blown completely out of proportion and argued down to the point of ridicule, but i pose it nonetheless.


It does seem that within many fields of study, people are hindered by the textbook writers in that the most knowledgeable people seem to create the confines within which other people in the filed are to work if they want to be taken seriously. I'm not saying this is entirely a bad thing, but there must exist the possibility that these confines are not the true boundaries. Unlearned people won't care about the boundaries or about making stupid mistakes because ultimately nobody is going to call them incompetent .

Would be great to hear what you guys think about this.

Hang around here and you will see plenty of this.

Surprisingly, the same ideas come up over and over, like, does antimatter have antigravity? After a while you will have seen everything.

The ideas of quantum mechanics are weird, and relativity is VERY weird. The odds of ordinary people coming up with this stuff is quite close to zero. I mean, there are reasons that the men who formulated these theories are very famous. It was a truly exceptional accomplishment. The chance of amateurs coming up with something BETTER is very, very low. I think you would have a better chance with lottery tickets.

Operating in ignorance is a big disadvantage. It makes more sense to avoid the thousands of blind alleys that have already been thoroughly explored.

It's actually fairly easy to come up with radical ideas. ArchivX is full of them. There are so many that people who want to do real work avoid them, since one could spend a great deal of time reading this stuff.

A big problem is that new ideas are either 1) wrong 2) duplicates of existing ideas 3) impractical to verify, so many physicists consider it an enticing but ultimately dangerous to your career to mess with. A particularly nasty problem is that the closer it is to right, the more time and effort it takes to refute it.

Another big problem is that the uneducated tend to invent their own private languages to express their ideas. Who wants to take all the effort to learn such a thing, since any payoff is a very long shot?

Gracing this forum is a professor with many publications who has come up with a new interpretation of quantum physics in terms of thermodynamics. He knows all the current theories very well. Nevertheless reception to his ideas is mixed. Some are interested, some say "why do we need a new interpretation? Too much work to learn it. What I have is good enough." So even when you have everything going for you, it is a hard sell.
 
  • #5
lauchlan said:
People are not monkeys though and there will be some logic, however uninformed, behind their ideas. So their answer would be a lot less random.

I wouldn't filter the garbage because i don't know anything about physics, but maybe somebody who knows a bit might see something interesting amongst the rubble. That is kind of what i am getting at.

You didn't get it - it was a rhetoric question.

Effort involved in filtering the garbage makes whole idea ridiculous. It is much easier (and requires less effort) to learn enough to be able to derive reasonable equations, or to propose new ideas based on known ones.

What is easier - to learn how to multiply and to write a multiplication table, or to ask hundreds of people to put random numbers into the table and then test them to see which ones are correct?
 
  • #6
lauchlan said:
People are not monkeys though and there will be some logic, however uninformed, behind their ideas. So their answer would be a lot less random.

I wouldn't filter the garbage because i don't know anything about physics, but maybe somebody who knows a bit might see something interesting amongst the rubble. That is kind of what i am getting at.

I have posted such rubble to the forum. I was invited to cease this practice.
 
  • #7
Watch this (the end of it):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
 
  • #8
Why physics and not some other field like medicine? Why not let people think of various drugs and surgical procedures and then test each of them? After all they are not confined by the boundaries of modern medical science.
Unfortunately I have meet people that see no problem with this.
 
  • #9
bp_psy said:
Why physics and not some other field like medicine? Why not let people think of various drugs and surgical procedures and then test each of them? After all they are not confined by the boundaries of modern medical science.
Unfortunately I have meet people that see no problem with this.
I was just going to mention this. I commonly find a misunderstanding/proposition that lay people can come up with new physical theories that may be valid yet this proposition does not extend to chemistry, biology, medicine etc. I think part of the reason could be that people are more interested in learning about the wider universe but to do so very complicated theories are simplified to analogies, then lay people try to develop the analogy rather than the theory and think they have come up with a new physical theory.

In addition without the relevant training lay-people often lack the relevant knowledge to even understand the question, let alone begin to answer it.
 
  • #10
doesn't medicine have a pretty bad reputation for making crap up and being male-centric? I kind of feel like I have to fight dark-age medicine when I go to my public healthcare providers.
 
  • #11
micromass said:
Watch this (the end of it):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
Slam dunk Micro... :biggrin:

Rhody
 
  • #12
Pythagorean said:
doesn't medicine have a pretty bad reputation for making crap up and being male-centric? I kind of feel like I have to fight dark-age medicine when I go to my public healthcare providers.
Er...where are you lol?
 
  • #13
lauchlan said:
Do you guys think it is possible and worthwhile to pose complicated physics problems in simple ways to lay people and children with little or no knowledge of the subject and see what answers they come up with.
No - that should be self-evident.
 
  • #14
micromass said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
Brilliant! :approve:

BTW, there aren't infinite possibilities.
 
  • #15
Why do lay people need to play around with physics?

Physics is a profession and worked on by people who are trained through education and work experience.
Ryan_m_b said:
I was just going to mention this. I commonly find a misunderstanding/proposition that lay people can come up with new physical theories that may be valid yet this proposition does not extend to chemistry, biology, medicine etc. I think part of the reason could be that people are more interested in learning about the wider universe but to do so very complicated theories are simplified to analogies, then lay people try to develop the analogy rather than the theory and think they have come up with a new physical theory.

In addition without the relevant training lay-people often lack the relevant knowledge to even understand the question, let alone begin to answer it.

I think modern pop science and pop science shows are to blame.
 
  • #16
There's no need to waste kids' time doing this. You can use computers instead.

Of course you have to supply them with observations, not "concepts". They can figure out the concepts for themselves...

http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/Science09_Schmidt.pdf
 
  • #17
lauchlan said:
If you told people to make an equation from various concepts. If you gave them energy, velocity, mass, volume, light speed and maybe a few others and you gave this to a few million people, how long would it be before one of them came up with E=MC2?

The problem is that special relativity is not just [itex]E=mc^2[/itex]. Any idiot can look at dimensional analysis and come up with [itex]E=mc^2[/itex]. Figuring what it means is what matters! A large number of laypersons will never figure that out. One set of examples are things such as the Planck length, Planck temperature, Planck energy, etc. The Planck energy is given by the only combination of the fundamental constants of the universe that give you an energy, or [itex]E_{Planck} = \sqrt{{\hbar c^5}\over{G}}[/itex]. It's believed that these energies, temperatures, etc., are where quantum mechanics and gravity will merge.

That's totally useless though! Physics is not about throwing letters together and calling it science. Any unified theory of quantum gravity is not going to be just about 1 or 2 simple equations just like special relativity is not just about [itex]E=mc^2[/itex].

Another example is something even simpler that I was discussing with my adviser a couple weeks ago at a reception. I asked "do students ever ask you why the kinetic energy of an object is [itex]{{1}\over{2}}mv^2[/itex] and not something like [itex]mv^2[/itex]?". Well, the answer, of course, is no, students never ask :D. However, this is the point. Ask random people to think like you're suggesting, and who is to say kinetic energy isn't just [itex]mv^2[/itex]? You need the rest of Newtonian mechanics to be able to determine exactly what it is because the entire theory must be self-consistent and randomly generating 1 equation from a theory is not helpful!

It really annoys me (and I'm not saying you're doing this) when people think that the lay person has just as much ability to make breakthroughs in physics. I think it does kind of say something for how elegant physics can be at times. Newtonian mechanics, Schrodinger's equation, General Relativity, the Dirac Equation, and a few other equations can be written down in such amazingly simple ways (despite the background and actual implementation being amazingly complex) that I have a feeling people think physics IS simple.
 
  • #18
Ryan_m_b said:
Er...where are you lol?

Alaska, USA
 
  • #19
Pythagorean said:
Alaska, USA
Anesthesia there is still a shot of bourbon and a bullet to bite on?
 
  • #20
bp_psy said:
Why physics and not some other field like medicine? Why not let people think of various drugs and surgical procedures and then test each of them? After all they are not confined by the boundaries of modern medical science.
Unfortunately I have meet people that see no problem with this.

This was basically how it was done until the advent of the FDA.

Now we do the same thing, but with safety studies.
 
  • #21
Galteeth said:
This was basically how it was done until the advent of the FDA.

Now we do the same thing, but with safety studies.
If I've missed some joke or sarcasm I apologise, sometimes I do that. If not the difference between the past and today in medical research is so much more than regulatory standards. The modern world is dominated by evidence based medicine. We rationally design drugs, therapies, devices etc based on our knowledge of biology, this is so much better than simply offering a random treatment and then observing the effects.
 
  • #22
The act of searching through all the people's garbage would take more effort than training people to create significant equations logically.

Also, computer algorithms are far more efficient at creating formulas than humans.
 
  • #23
Ryan_m_b said:
The modern world is dominated by evidence based medicine. We rationally design drugs, therapies, devices etc based on our knowledge of biology, this is so much better than simply offering a random treatment and then observing the effects.

For some reason, I thought of this...

Theodoric of York said:
"You know, medicine is not an exact science, but we are learning all the time. Why, just fifty years ago, they thought a disease like your daughter's was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach."
 
  • #24
Ryan_m_b said:
If I've missed some joke or sarcasm I apologise, sometimes I do that. If not the difference between the past and today in medical research is so much more than regulatory standards. The modern world is dominated by evidence based medicine. We rationally design drugs, therapies, devices etc based on our knowledge of biology, this is so much better than simply offering a random treatment and then observing the effects.

I was thinking of this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16007129
A mysterious epidemic is sweeping Central America - it's the second biggest cause of death among men in El Salvador, and in Nicaragua it's a bigger killer of men than HIV and diabetes combined. It's unexplained but the latest theory is that the victims are literally working themselves to death.
 

1. How can lay people accurately answer complicated questions?

The key to accurately answering complicated questions as a lay person is to first thoroughly understand the question at hand. This may involve conducting research, consulting with experts, and breaking down the question into smaller, more manageable parts. It is also important to remain objective and avoid personal biases when answering the question.

2. What qualifications or background knowledge do lay people need to have in order to answer complicated questions?

While having a background in the subject matter can be helpful, it is not always necessary for lay people to have specific qualifications or expertise in order to answer complicated questions. What is more important is having critical thinking skills, the ability to research and analyze information, and a willingness to learn and understand the topic at hand.

3. Are there any limitations to lay people answering complicated questions?

Yes, there can be limitations to lay people answering complicated questions. These limitations may include a lack of access to resources or information, a limited understanding of the subject matter, and potential biases or personal opinions that can impact the accuracy of their answer. It is important for lay people to acknowledge and address these limitations in order to provide a well-informed answer.

4. How can lay people ensure the accuracy and reliability of their answers to complicated questions?

To ensure the accuracy and reliability of their answers, lay people can consult with experts or reputable sources, conduct thorough research, and critically evaluate the information they are using to answer the question. It is also important to be transparent about any limitations or biases that may impact the answer and to seek feedback and corrections from others.

5. What role do lay people play in answering complicated questions in the scientific community?

Lay people can play a valuable role in answering complicated questions in the scientific community by bringing new perspectives and ideas, providing feedback and critiques, and helping to bridge the gap between scientific research and the general public. Lay people can also serve as advocates for scientific literacy and play an important role in communicating complex scientific concepts to a wider audience.

Similar threads

  • General Discussion
Replies
16
Views
919
  • General Discussion
Replies
14
Views
981
  • General Discussion
Replies
9
Views
1K
  • General Discussion
Replies
3
Views
610
  • General Discussion
Replies
11
Views
1K
  • General Discussion
2
Replies
54
Views
3K
Replies
7
Views
5K
  • General Discussion
Replies
28
Views
9K
Back
Top