Why are Physicists so informal with mathematics?

[Sassan]

Well that is another false generalization. There is a huge body of experimental work in medicine, psychology, biology, materials science, and many other scientific fields. Physics does not have a monopoly on the scientific method.

Again, this is not unique to physics. As someone with your background should know.

It is the reality at the graduate level. Again, as you should know.

> experimental work in medicine, psychology, biology, materials science,
Medical education does NOT involve experimentation; I know: I was married to a surgeon.
Psychology involves experimentation but because they use mostly nominal/ordinal/interval (and not ratio) scales of measurement, those experiments have a different (less rigorous) scientific basis than physics
Material science is "essentially" a branch of physics, or is at least based on physics.
And the one you did not mention: Political Science. That is an important field, but today it is not taught AS science.

 

[Orodruin]

Medical education does NOT involve experimentation; I know: I was married to a surgeon.

That’s simply not true. I strongly doubt the let your (former?) spouse into an OR without any previous hands-on knowledge on how to handle it. That is experimentation. The entire subject of medicine rests on the results of countless trials and other experiments. Suggesting otherwise is quite astonishing.

My parents, both medical doctors, used to say they met at a corpse that they had to dissect.

 

[Frabjous]

Do I teach only the generally acceptable results deduced from those experiments, or do I go further back and encourage students to understand why an experiment was performed, how that experiment was performed, how certain deductions were made from that experiment, and whether the outcome of that experiment is amenable to other conclusions.

That’s several history of science courses. It took centuries to get from Newton to Hamilton. Faraday started his career in the 1810’s. Hertz didn’t do his experiments until the 1880’s. Does one need to teach the old quantum mechanics before doing Heisenberg and Schrodinger? These debates took generations. One cannot teach them and get students to state of the art in an acceptable amount of time.

 

[Dale]

Medical education does NOT involve experimentation; I know: I was married to a surgeon.

Another ill informed generalization. Some medical education DOES involve experimentation; I know: I coauthored papers where medical students actually performed and published experiments. This is universal in combined MD PhD programs.

Psychology involves experimentation but because they use mostly nominal/ordinal/interval (and not ratio) scales of measurement, those experiments have a different (less rigorous) scientific basis than physics

How is that for elitism? You want to dismiss the science-ness of an entire branch of science because it isn’t “rigorous” enough for you. I don’t think that the scientific method forbids nominal measurements, so why should you?

Not only is psychology, as a field, highly experimental, but it is also a perfect counterexample to your claim because experiments are central to the education process. Freshman psychology classes are packed full of experiments and even undergraduates perform novel scientific experiments as part of the routine curriculum.

Agriculture is another field where the education curriculum relies heavily on experiments. Both agriculture and psychology are trying to understand very complicated systems, but such complicated systems are in fact part of nature, and scientific experiments are in fact part of their curriculum.

Anyway, I am done here. Your arguments have been sufficiently debunked. Your criticism of physics education is full of false generalizations, and your valid criticisms also apply to many other disciplines.

 

[Sassan]

That’s simply not true. I strongly doubt the let your (former?) spouse into an OR without any previous hands-on knowledge on how to handle it. That is experimentation. The entire subject of medicine rests on the results of countless trials and other experiments. Suggesting otherwise is quite astonishing.

My parents, both medical doctors, used to say they met at a corpse that they had to dissect.

Words must mean different things to us! "Hands-on knowledge" is not experimentation. Dissection is not experimentation; it is demonstration and, at best, exploration. Are medical students told by their professor, "This is the research question, and this is a hypothesis pertaining to that question. Now I want you to set up an experiment to see if you can confirm or falsify that hypothesis"?!
90% of medical training is memorization of terminology and facts; the rest is demonstration, exploration, and analysis. I am talking strictly about medical TRAINING, not the broad interdisciplinary field of medicine.
Being astonished is not an argument.

 

[Sassan]

Another ill informed generalization. Some medical education DOES involve experimentation; I know: I coauthored papers where medical students actually performed and published experiments. This is universal in combined MD PhD programs.

How is that for elitism? You want to dismiss the science-ness of an entire branch of science because it isn’t “rigorous” enough for you. I don’t think that the scientific method forbids nominal measurements, so why should you?

Not only is psychology, as a field, highly experimental, but it is also a perfect counterexample to your claim because experiments are central to the education process. Freshman psychology classes are packed full of experiments and even undergraduates perform novel scientific experiments as part of the routine curriculum.

Agriculture is another field where the education curriculum relies heavily on experiments. Both agriculture and psychology are trying to understand very complicated systems, but such complicated systems are in fact part of nature, and scientific experiments are in fact part of their curriculum.

Anyway, I am done here. Your arguments have been sufficiently debunked. Your criticism of physics education is full of false generalizations, and your valid criticisms apply to all disciplines.

I write "those experiments have a different (less rigorous) scientific basis than physics" and you read that as I "want to dismiss the science-ness of an entire branch of science." So much for communication.

 

[Orodruin]

"This is the research question, and this is a hypothesis pertaining to that question. Now I want you to set up an experiment to see if you can confirm or falsify that hypothesis"?!

Impossible. It may be possible in early stages of physics education, but certainly not in latter stages.

You certainly cannot expect physics students to design an experiment verifying the Higgs mechanism.

And talk about elitism when you claim monopoly on what can and cannot be considered an experiment, dismissing out of hand entire branches of science where for some reason you do not feel experiments are rigorous enough.

 

[pinball1970]

Medical education does NOT involve experimentation;

Medics, students of dentistry and probably the vast majority of life sciences have to complete units on biochemistry, bacteriology, pathology et al, all of which have lab work, experiments which is part of the teaching.

 

[pines-demon]

I never said or implied that in teaching the role of the Lorentz factor in Special Relativity, the ONLY thing that matters is its geometric derivation. What I AM saying is that teaching that simple geometric derivation (in addition to everything else) creates a deeper understanding than just memorizing a formula.

Then this is a weird example, because physics student do learn that.

That derivation makes one UNDERSTAND the WHY of time dilation in addition to the WHAT and the HOW of it.

It does not tell you the WHY, you can remove WHY from physics and everything stays the same.

But if the standard physics education is based on just learning and knowing physics without understanding it (whenever that understanding is possible), and professional physicists advocate this paradigm, who am I to disagree?!

Physicists understand it, what makes you think that they don't? I maybe missed that part.

 

[berkeman]

You sound like there is perfect consensus amongst professional physicists who read only peer-reviewed journals, and also that this elite group feels no need to communicate their knowledge to those at a lower level in a lucid, clear, logical manner. There is almost a feeling of disdain for clarity and lucidity

Despite the efforts of the professional scientists and educators who've been replying to you, you appear quite set in your opinions, and this thread is not going anywhere productive. It is now closed.