
What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists - tbrownaw
https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists
======
Xcelerate
Whenever I talk about physics (to non-scientists), I notice that people have a
tendency to start veering away from the math and onto irrelevant metaphysical
tangents. For instance, I'll be trying to explain the history of
renormalization in quantum field theory, and someone will suggest, "Well maybe
we don't really understand infinity". No, we understand "infinity" just fine.
It's a concept that's clearly defined using a set of axioms that have been
around for thousands of years. "Well maybe the mathematicians are wrong." I
start losing my patience pretty quickly at this point. The other big one that
annoys me is "Well it's just a theory". Sure, and gravity is just a theory
too. If you doubt it, you're free to go skydiving without a parachute, but
personally, I'm not taking any chances.

~~~
devishard
The free will conversations drive me insane. People can't shut up about how
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle proves random phenomena (which isn't
exactly true) but worse, they insist it indicates that we have free will.

But a) what it really indicates is that it would be _unmeasurable_ whether we
have free will, and b) it also doesn't really prove that, because while
electron positions are unpredictable, molecular reactions, the sort that
happen in the human brain are pretty predictable.

Basically, my response to this is "That would be relevant if we had black
holes or large hadron colliders in our heads, but we don't, so...". But people
really really want to believe in free will and will use any sliver of half-
truth to believe they've proved it.

EDIT: To be clear, I do not believe free will has been proven OR disproven.

EDIT 2: More sophisticated wrong people argue from Bell's Inequalities rather
than the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, but that also results from a
misunderstanding of the theory and also neither proves nor disproves
determinism.

~~~
peteretep
Given what we know about brains so far, doesn't it need to be proven, rather
than disproven? Surely the burden of proof here is on people claiming a non-
biological and non-predictable basis for brain function?

~~~
marcoperaza
I don't see how subjective experience, i.e. consciousness, can come about from
purely material interactions as currently understood. That means that a Turing
Machine would be able to produce them, which means that a bunch of monks
working with paper and pencil for thousands of years would be able to produce
them. There's something fundamental that we don't understand and the
scientific community is very opposed to talking about it, dismissing any and
all speculation as quackery. This taboo is holding back serious inquiry into
the matter.

~~~
chriswarbo
> That means that a Turing Machine would be able to produce them, which means
> that a bunch of monks working with paper and pencil for thousands of years
> would be able to produce them.

Yes. What's not to see? I think appealing to something other than Turing
machines shows a lack of imagination; it takes a lot of thought to even
scratch the surface of how profound Turing machines are.

~~~
marcoperaza
Are you really arguing that a scribbling numbers on a piece of paper could
give rise to a conscious being?

~~~
Sacho
I think you're giving a good example of how poorly people visualize and
understand infinity. A Turing Machine's capabilities are based on its infinite
memory and infinite computation time, yet you imagine it as "a bunch of monks
scribbling" and immediately dismiss its capabilities.

~~~
chriswarbo
I would actually restrict things further, since introducing infinity can lead
to unintuitive results orthogonal to computability ;)

Rather than 'possessing' an infinite tape and infinite time, I prefer to think
of turing machines as always being allowed to perform one more step, and
always being allowed to use one more tape cell. I find this characterisation
of time quite intuitive as-is, whilst the tape can be made intuitive by
imagining tape factories on each end, which produce more cells whenever the
read/write head gets close.

In fact, such "tape factories" have been used to build universal turing
machines in the game of life [http://rendell-
attic.org/gol/fullutm/index.htm](http://rendell-
attic.org/gol/fullutm/index.htm)

------
j2kun
> A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they project literal
> meanings onto words such as ‘grains’ of space-time or particles ‘popping’ in
> and out of existence. Science writers should be more careful to point out
> when we are using metaphors. My clients read way too much into pictures,
> measuring every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash.
> Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant
> information and what is artistic freedom. But the most important lesson I’ve
> learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so
> complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can
> easily do it themselves. How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes
> if we never tell them?

Just the other day I went to a talk by a prestigious physicist who, on top of
telling only half-truths _at best_, made all of these mistakes and more. And
the audience ate it up! As a mathematician and guy-who-writes-about-math-
online, it makes me feel very frustrated. I also realized the difference
between a physicist and a mathematician: a physicist is openly willing to
compromise their principles and stretch the truth for the sake of press, while
a mathematician sticks to the truth and as a result nobody cares.

~~~
martincmartin
_a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the
truth for the sake of press, while a mathematician sticks to the truth and as
a result nobody cares._

I think it goes deeper than this. I was in the same undergraduate mathematics
and physics classes as Nima Arkani-Hamed[1]. In calculus class, we learned
very formal, epsilon-delta calculus (from Spivak's textbook). In physics, we
learned from Feynman's Lectures on Physics.

Years later I went to lunch with him, and he mentioned that he spent much of
his time fighting the formalist instincts from our Calculus class, and
thinking more intuitively about mathematics. I do think physicists play more
fast-and-loose with mathematics, e.g. using approximations like a few terms
from a Taylor series, or other assumptions. When talking to the public, I can
see how that would turn into playing fast-and-loose with the facts in order to
"project" their knowledge into the space spanned by laypeople's knowledge,
even if that projection loses important aspects of the work.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nima_Arkani-
Hamed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nima_Arkani-Hamed)

~~~
j2kun
I think the "fast and loose" goes much deeper than using a few terms of a
Taylor series approximation (more like ignoring non-convergence!). Because
mathematicians have to go through the same process of shrugging off the formal
rigor to think intuitively about mathematics. (Terry Tao wrote at length about
this process)

I can understand the desire to appeal to a wide audience, but in this
particular talk I couldn't identify a single bit of "projected" knowledge that
one could hope to retain from the talk.

------
mindcrime
Some of these folks could probably benefit from reading a book that I just
bought: _The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need To Know To Start Doing
Physics_.

[https://www.amazon.com/Theoretical-Minimum-Start-Doing-
Physi...](https://www.amazon.com/Theoretical-Minimum-Start-Doing-
Physics/dp/0465075681)

It's a cool book... written to be relatively accessible, but is actually
grounded in the real principles and math used in physics. As somebody who
considers himself an autodidact of sorts (in that I'm as much self-taught as
formally educated), but who has _some_ awareness of "what I don't know" (and
therefore doesn't sit around coming up with crackpot theories about quantum
mechanics and what-not), I love this kind of stuff.

One of the authors is Leonard Susskind who is pretty credible. This is a book
that is serious, but succinct (as you might guess from the title). Note that
there is also a companion volume that is specifically about Quantum Mechanics.
[https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Theoretical-
Leonard...](https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Theoretical-Leonard-
Susskind/dp/0465062903/)

All of that said, I do think it's important to note (as others already have)
that "autodidact != crank". Plenty of autodidacts are just people who study
physics (or whatever) because they find it interesting, but they are aware of
their limitations and don't pretend to have amazing new insights that have
escaped physics for decades, etc. Likewise I'm pretty sure you can find cranks
who have a formal education as well.

~~~
Dr_Jefyll
> autodidact != crank

This. Unless you consider Charles Darwin, Oliver Heaviside, James Watt and
Thomas Edison cranks. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, as you can see
here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts)

~~~
j2kun
That being said, there are cranks on that list.

------
pklausler
A very long time ago, I worked for Seymour Cray. He received a surprising
amount of crank mail (and back then, it was real postal mail, not e-mail). His
secretary filtered out the crank mail, spared him from it, and was good enough
to pass the best stuff on to some of the engineers that would appreciate it.

I still have some of it, including a long treatise from an inmate at the
county jail who had a theory of interplanetary transportation involving
kangaroos whose energy output would be measured in "gigahops".

EDIT: two minor typos

~~~
sevensor
I'm tremendously amused by the kangaroo theory!

~~~
pklausler
I suppose that we'd be talking about "exahops" today.

------
forgotpwtomain
> Sociologists have long tried and failed to draw a line between science and
> pseudoscience. In physics, though, that ‘demarcation problem’ is a non-
> problem, solved by the pragmatic observation that we can reliably tell an
> outsider when we see one.

So generally for sciences (and for compsci cranks as well) we have a direct
answer because either your theories can be experimentally verified or they
cannot. This is normally a solid position but it puts for example the decades
of work on string theory in a bind - since they haven't produced a single
verifiable result either.

So the author offers a tangential and more broadly encompassing but
subjectively experiential position:

> During a decade of education, we physicists learn more than the tools of the
> trade; we also learn the walk and talk of the community, shared through
> countless seminars and conferences, meetings, lectures and papers. After
> exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you’re one of us. You can’t fake
> our community slang any more than you can fake a local accent in a foreign
> country.

Sure, that's great you've verified membership in a social group - but that's
really _insufficient_ when you are trying to identify crank science. This
sentence can also be applied to all kinds of cults and secular belief systems,
hell, I think most of academic humanities fall under this as well.

Anecdotal - I know someone who is a well accomplished researcher in their
respective experimental physics field (with numerous citations), as a hobby
they also happen to have an interest in theoretical physics, where they have
published several papers entirely to no response (which to my understanding
would be pretty awesome of they were not incorrect) . So it's not just in and
out of 'professional physics', the number of people specializing in a
particular area can be very small and closed off in an even more domain
particular kind of way.

~~~
selimthegrim
If you read many many scientific articles for a living, you can begin to tell
from the writing style whether this is a crank or not.

------
epistasis
>My clients almost exclusively get their information from the popular science
media. Often, they get something utterly wrong in the process. Once I hear
their reading of an article about, say, space-time foam or black hole
firewalls, I can see where their misunderstanding stems from. But they come up
with interpretations that never would have crossed my mind when writing an
article.

This isn't just physics articles, and isn't just cranks. Most of the popular
reporting on science gets things very wrong. I can't say whether physics is
more correct or less correct, but I think I notice less eye-rolling and
complaints from physicists about popular news articles than I do from other
fields.

Something to keep in mind for people that are getting their science news from
the media.

~~~
Analog24
As a (former) physicist I have to say that there is plenty of eye-rolling
about how physics is portrayed in the news. However, in any branch of modern
physics it is accepted that no news article aimed at the general public could
ever possibly convey the science with complete accuracy. Simply because it
requires years of study and specialization to really understand it.

I did my graduate research at the LHC and I was there when the Higgs boson was
discovered. I can't tell you how many people (non physicists) came to me with
questions about it that were completely misguided because of it's
misrepresentation in the news ("God particle" \- holy mother of terrible catch
phrases). But at the same time how can anyone expect to convey the full scope
of the Standard Model in a news article?

The problem isn't that simplifying science with nice metaphors and analogies
is wrong, it's that people who read the articles don't understand that what
they're reading is just that: a nice metaphor or analogy. People think that
because the science is dumbed down for a general audience that it must be
simple enough for a general audience to understand. Unfortunately, that has
not been the case in physics (and most other fields) for over a hundred years
and never will be again.

~~~
th0ma5
Often I wish articles were written targeting a person with an undergrad or
grad degree in physics rather than the typical 6th grade reading level. If
people don't understand stuff they can google it or just not read the article.

~~~
forgetsusername
> _If people don 't understand stuff they can google it or just not read the
> article._

Or if _you_ are interested beyond an elementary level, _you_ can Google for
more complicated subject matter. There's more than enough out there to wet
your whistle.

Do you really think most normal people are going to look further into some
random subject they didn't understand? Because that's who the mainstream media
is appealing to. One of my pet peeves is coming into these very comment
sections and someone criticizing an article for being "dumbed down". If you
know the subject matter and find it "easy" then the article was probably not
targeted at you. Why ask the author to write a "harder" article?

~~~
dredmorbius
The reason to demand articles which push the limits of public understanding in
discourse of complex topics is _because that 's the only way you get a more
informed public, and more informed discussion._

It comes down to basic communications theory -- Claude Shannon stuff (though
this may be a comparison made by others, I need to check sources). An
_informative_ communication is based on _both_ and established common
understanding _and_ new material. The common understanding provides the basis
for contextualising the issue, the novel material, for extending the
receiver's understanding.

A communication which is completely novel simply won't be understood. A
communication which is completely known conveys no new information. You need a
balance.

I think I first encountered this concept in _Grammatical Man_ , a 1980s-ish
book by Jeremy Campbell on information and chaos theory, exceptionally well
written, and highly recommended.

More recently, recalling as I write this, I've seen a plot of the level of
understanding of an audience by different types of lecturers. Most start high
and proceed low, though it's the specific plots they follow which provide the
amusement value.

Here we are: The Nine Kinds of Physics Seminar
[https://manyworldstheory.com/2013/10/03/the-9-kinds-of-
physi...](https://manyworldstheory.com/2013/10/03/the-9-kinds-of-physics-
seminar/)

------
api
I've been fascinated for a long time by just how much _effective_
autodidactism there is in software vs. other fields. There are tons of people
who have made major contributions here that are completely self-taught.

Software is uniquely suited to autodidactism for three reasons:

(1) The tools are easy to obtain and easy to start using. Capital cost is low
to non-existent.

(2) The learning feedback loop is nearly instantaneous and the results are
almost always perfectly objective. Things either work or they don't. There is
not much room for delusional or wishful thinking.

(3) Resources for learning are readily available and are mostly written in a
style that is utilitarian and straightforward rather than cliquish and arcane.

Theoretical physics passes on point #1 until you hit the need to do serious
experimentation, but it fails on points #2 and #3. There is no command prompt
that will tell you in 10ms if a theory is at least rational and internally
consistent, and advanced mathematics has an arcane symbology and jargon that
seems almost intentionally designed to resist penetration by those outside the
academic circles where it is used and taught.

~~~
fritzo
I think (2) is the crux. You can deceive yourself about your completeness of
understanding, but you can't implement an idea in code until you understand
(or are at least aware of) a complete set of components.

------
schoen
I get the e-mail for the EFF Cooperative Computing Awards

[https://www.eff.org/awards/coop](https://www.eff.org/awards/coop)

so, despite having put lots of effort into not having people make spurious
claims, I hear from a whole lot of math cranks.

Two things that I find striking are many people's level of confidence that
they can personally "solve the problem" (in this case, by inventing some kind
of "formula for primes" that has eluded the organized mathematics world for
decades), and many people's lack of understanding of _what a solution would
consist of_ (in terms of knowing that mathematical proofs exist, and being
able to understand whether they have a theorem or just a conjecture).

Our situation is especially tricky because we chose a problem that experts
said would require lots of computational resources and couldn't be solved by
new mathematical insight, but then we didn't outright _forbid_ people from
trying to solve it by insight. So a lot of people see an exciting challenge,
like "they think it will take a lot of computer time, but if I can just _see
the pattern_ , I can skip all of that!". Also, we have a large monetary reward
for solutions and so people are excited by the idea that they have them and
are about to receive a bunch of money.

I think it's true that many of the people who contact me about this are
excited about mathematics in the way that people who contacted Dr.
Hossenfelder were excited about physics (and, as pdkl95 said, that Carl
Sagan's cab driver was excited about science). But it's still frustrating
that, after we've gone to some lengths to say that you need a proof and not
just a guess, and that decades of research indicate that you can't find primes
of this size without significant computer time, people are still so confident
that their guesses are right and so resistant to accepting that they haven't
met the awards criteria.

It would be interesting to see an equivalent service for talking to
mathematicians and to see what some of the people who contact us might get out
of it, and whether it might inspire them to pursue more constructive things.
(I always wish that our awards would motivate someone to start doing Project
Euler problems or something...) If someone set up that "talk to a
mathematician" service, I would probably try to send lots of people their way.

~~~
drauh
Oh god. "Formula for primes" \- I was involved in a way too long forum
discussion where everyone involved was trying to convince the guy putting
forth his idea for generating primes that he was merely going round in
circles, proving and reproving identities.

As a former physicist, I think that math is way harder to talk about to
laypeople, though there can be a wide variation in difficulty by subfield.
Maybe number theory can be accessible, but analysis, say, would be pretty
opaque. Not to mention some of the more exotic branches of math.

~~~
schoen
I've unfortunately received somewhere around 100 supposed formulas for primes
in the past decade and a half. :-(

There's a great Wikipedia article about this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_for_primes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_for_primes)

But most of what people send me is along the lines of "numbers containing only
odd digits, that don't end in 5" or "4k+1 for any k, if it contains only odd
digits", or "(p-1)²+7 for any prime p" or whatever. A kind of unfortunate
example was an elementary school girl who became convinced that numbers
containing only odd digits are always prime (many people are tempted by some
form of this idea), and spent several weeks writing such digits down in a
composition notebook in order to form an integer that would be big enough to
qualify for one of our awards.

~~~
pklausler
And the counterexample of 15 didn't work?

~~~
schoen
I've come up with counterexamples for every such formula or rule that people
have sent me (usually running a Python loop with gmpy2.is_prime() or
something), but unfortunately the existence of the counterexamples somehow
didn't occur to them before they wrote in in the first place.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_coincidence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_coincidence)
is a big problem because people will sometimes conjecture a pattern and then
find that it holds for 6 or 7 integers and conclude that it's right. Or if
they find a counterexample, they might just make a minimal modification to the
conjecture and conclude that they're fixed it! So there are lots of these that
will say "unless the number is..." and presumably give some other random
property that the counterexample that the claimant found had.

It feels like some people think that mathematics works by people guessing
rules and then checking them, and regarding the rules as right if they "check
out" in practice. (I know that there's been lots of progress made from guesses
and conjectures and numerical experiments; the issue is just what comes
_after_ the guess!)

~~~
senorprogrammer
> mathematics works by people guessing rules and then checking them

This will sound facetious, but I suspect many people treat great swathes of
life this way. My wife has a friend who tries any random googled herb-based
cure any time she gets ill. Recovery from this illness, this cold or flu, is
always taken as proof of the validity of the cure, regardless of how long
she's had to ingest it.

You, reading this, have already thought of half a dozen ways to disprove her
cures, as have I, however no amount of evidence can assuage this need to
believe. At this point my theory is that this belief forms an intractable part
of her personal identity.

At the core of all of this, and perhaps for these "autodidact physicists" as
well, seems to be a very primal need to understand the universe in terms
comprehendible one's self, regardless the cost.

~~~
ktRolster
_> mathematics works by people guessing rules and then checking them

This will sound facetious, but I suspect many people treat great swathes of
life this way_

Including programming. Good programmers are the ones who try to derive the
underlying rules, instead of trying something and checking if it works for a
couple cases.

------
martincmartin
There are many people who decide not to go into research but enter industry
instead. Some of them don't have the intellectual chops, but others are turned
off by the politics, long hours that professors work, spending more time
writing grant proposals and managing students than doing research, etc.

Some of them have spare time, or maybe will have spare time after their kids
are grown, or will be able to retire early. Then they could become citizen
scientists [1], independent scientists [2], etc.

I wonder how to organize and encourage them? How to redirect or weed out the
cranks, and encourage those who are motivated and can look at things from a
new perspective?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist)

~~~
j2kun
I like this idea, but how much time would be spent re-teaching the citizen
scientists the prerequisites needed to do research? Since most of the
knowledge at the forefront of research is in papers and not books, that seems
like the biggest hurdle.

~~~
cbHXBY1D
It would be up to the citizen scientist to keep up with newly published
papers.

I think it would be interesting to create an environment that encourages the
hobby scientist to follow the forefront of research. Maybe something like the
Recurse Center but for maths and physics. I'm not sure where the funding would
come from since the Recurse Center seems to make money from corporate
recruiting. Maybe universities?

~~~
maverick_iceman
Nothing's stopping them even now (at least in most theoretical sciences).
Almost all books and papers are freely if not always legally available in the
internet. If they discover something they can write up a paper and submit it
to an appropriate journal.

------
bigger_cheese
"Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in
engineering or a related industry ... After exchanging a few sentences, we can
tell if you’re one of us. You can’t fake our community slang any more than you
can fake a local accent in a foreign country."

This matches my experience. During the final year of my Engineering degree I
decided to take a third year particle physics elective because it sounded
interesting. The course had no pre-requisites but it probably should have. I
remember showing up to the first lecture and being one of the only non-science
students in the theatre. The lecturer started talking about Hamiltonian's,
Fermi-Dirac Statistics and Wave-Functions and it all just went completely over
my head. There was a whole bunch of "foreign" concepts that were assumed. I
ended up needing to check out a bunch of physics texts from the library and
over the next few weeks I had to teach myself the 2+ years of physics
knowledge the rest of the class was familiar with. I passed the course but it
was a lot of work for what was supposed to be an elective.

------
martincmartin
Einstein famously couldn't find a teaching position after graduation, spent 2
years unemployed, then worked as a patent clerk in a patent office. According
to wikipedia: "Much of his work at the patent office related to questions
about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical
synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in
the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical
conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between
space and time."

So there's two lessons here, I think: 1. People outside academia can still
make important contributions, and 2. spending a lot of time thinking about
other people's proposals, separating the good from the bad, and inspire a new,
fruitful way of looking at things, or at least overcoming standard mental
traps.

~~~
noahlt
Keep in mind that Einstein still went to grad school for physics.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kleiner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kleiner)

------
angrow
If we need a more neutral term than "crank", rather than "autodidact," why not
"outsider"?

An outsider artist is anyone who creates art not easily dismissed, despite not
participating in the social and academic communities of their medium, so why
can't there be outsider scientists and engineers as well?

~~~
Analog24
There is a big difference here. In physics, the "outsiders" are easily
dismissed. It's just that the outsiders themselves usually don't accept that
they're just flat out wrong and convince themselves that it's the
establishment working against them.

~~~
Kinnard
Haven't many outsiders become insiders? Or really even . . . beatified?

I recall some famous scientists being forced to recant and being . . .
completely right. I additionally wouldn't by the argument that the scientific
community was on his side. The "community in power" was not on his side. And
that's what matters.

~~~
tdb7893
The vast majority of those situations are where the people are already
scientists and experts in their field. We are talking about people who are not
experts in physics.

------
sevenless
Seems to bear comparison to phone sex lines, in that you're satisfying a basic
human need - in this case, to be listened to.

John Baez keeps a 'Crackpot Index' score at
[http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html)

~~~
Animats
"50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete
testable predictions."

Unfortunately, that describes string theory, as Smolin keeps pointing out.

~~~
mathgenius
Do you know what Witten has said in response to this criticism? That string
theory predicts _gravity_. :-)

~~~
selimthegrim
I like how apparently everyone dismisses string theory predicting Bethe Ansatz
results as immaterial largely because no one outside of condensed matter and
some math people bothers learning about BA.

------
panglott
This strikes me more as a success of science journalism (people are inspired
to improve their understanding of physics) and a failure of science education
(intelligent, motivated amateurs receive no support outside of formal
education).

Along these lines, is there a good recommended contemporary popular work on
quantum physics for non-physicists?

~~~
ivan_ah
The "mechanics" of QM is linear algebra, so you should get a good base in LA
before looking into QM.

My upcoming book on LA has chapter on QM, specifically "matrix" quantum
mechanics, which is the subset of quantum physics phenomena that can be
represented using finite-dimensional vectors, matrices, projections, etc. For
the full "physicsy" QM course, you'll need to learn about the wave function
formalism, which is a bit more complicated...

------
netcan
This is a fun idea for a service.

I happened to read 3 articles this week on labour productivity. My economics
is undergraduate level with 15 years of rust, but I had an idea. I thought I
was brilliant for the rest of the day. But, I'd like to know if my idea is an
existing theorem, wrong for some reason I don't understand or (most likely) a
novel, brilliant idea that economists just overlooked.

Dunno if I'd pay $50 to find out. 34.99 tops, maybe. :)

~~~
morgante
At the very least, you should write it up and post it. There are some people
with more direct economics knowledge on HN.

------
dandare
>My clients almost exclusively get their information from the popular science
media. Often, they get something utterly wrong in the process. Once I hear
their reading of an article about, say, space-time foam or black hole
firewalls, I can see where their misunderstanding stems from. But they come up
with interpretations that never would have crossed my mind when writing an
article.

Can you see the parallel with democracy? Autodidacts can not really harm the
field of physics no matter how naively wrong they are. But we have voting
rights and we believe we understand the complex issues in sociology, justice,
economics ... I am depressed.

------
drauh
I've had my share trying to convince someone that a perpetual motion system
they described did not conserve energy or momentum. They refused to believe my
assertion that momentum and energy were conserved quantities.

~~~
_polymer_
But what if you were paid to convince them?

~~~
drauh
It was a long forum discussion, and well over a dozen engineers,
mathematicians, and physicists kept saying the same thing. Some wrong long
(>500 word) posts. We were all ignored. This person was invested in the idea
that they had an insight that centuries' worth of work had overlooked.

------
mrcactu5

      Many base their theories on images, 
      downloaded or drawn by hand, embedded 
      in long pamphlets. A few use basic 
      equations. Some add videos or applets. 
      Some work with 3D models of Styrofoam, 
      cardboard or wires.
    

Actually these are perfectly good ways of communicating ideas and solving
problems.

~~~
Analog24
I don't think the author is suggesting that diagrams and visualizations are
inherently bad. In fact, the vast majority of physics is done with help of
diagrams. Even modern particle physics (Feynman diagrams). I believe the
author is pointing out that a lot of people see a cartoon diagram in a news
article and treat it like a scaled blueprint of the theory/concept.

------
keithpeter
_" They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a
contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the
required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out
where to even begin."_

Any chance of on-boarding via experimental work/data analysis in some way like
in Astronomy?

[http://www.iau.org/public/themes/citizen-science-
projects/](http://www.iau.org/public/themes/citizen-science-projects/)

------
paulcole
The comments here are full of people who should be paying $50 for 20 minutes
of a physicist's time. Maybe we should start taking up a collection and seeing
if we can get a bulk discount.

------
erroneousfunk
I'm hardly a physicist, but I have a degree in "general engineering" (long
story about how I managed to escape specialization there) and a master's in
software engineering, and I've taken a few advanced math courses, including
partial differential equations, computational theory, scientific computing,
and a math-heavy course on relativity. I also spent a year and a half working
for a Harvard physics professor, alongside his team of grad students. So,
while I can't "do physics" I think I know enough to understand a little about
what it takes to _be_ a physicist, and appreciate the work that they do.

My husband and I were listening to a radio program
([http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/293/a...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/293/a-little-bit-of-knowledge)) about a man convinced that he
had found a mistake in Einstein's theory of relativity, and trying to
communicate this idea to a physicist (futilely, obviously). My husband, who
was a music major for a year before dropping out of college, and I started
getting in an argument about this episode that was so heated, I felt like we
were listening to two completely different stories!

I kept insisting that the advanced math and education wasn't just some funsies
shibboleth the physicists had to keep the hoi polloi out of physics -- the
devil's in the details and the man in the story didn't even understand the big
picture correctly. My husband was angry and insulted that the physicist
dismissed the man's theory out of hand, and felt that anyone could make a
contribution to physics with perhaps a little help from a calculus book --
just look at history! I thought the hero of the story (if there was one) was
clearly the physicist, while my husband was solidly on the side of the
electrician with a little learning, trying dangerous things.

I was really shocked. We don't usually fight like that, and especially over
something so seemingly trivial, but, in retrospect, I thought that it
displayed huge tension in society as a whole, between academics and non-
academics. We hear so much about the "one percent" and income-based class
distinctions, but relatively little about academic barriers in society,
whether real or artificially imposed. Should physics open up in a real way
(not just "pop science" articles and occasional books for laymen)? Should we
put a stronger "academic" focus in early public and high school education?
Should we provide more resources for "physicists who just need a little help
with the math" whether they're right or wrong?

Although I was staunchly in favor of the hallowed halls of academe, and it
still holds a special place in my heart, I suspect that the correct solution
lies somewhere in the middle. Anyway, fantastic article, and it really brings
up an important point that is too seldom addressed, by physicists, or society
as a whole!

~~~
zerohp
Just a nitpick, but Bob Berenz is an electrician not an electrical engineer.
Electrical engineering is firmly rooted in modern physics and an educated
electrical engineer would not need "help with the math." Out of all
engineering disciplines, an electrical engineer is possibly the most prepared
to work side by side with a physicist.

As to your questions, no, I don't think academics should provide more
resources to "physicists who just need a little help with the math." They are
not physicists and there are plenty of resources at community colleges that
can help them. We should not entertain the notions of those that refuse to
learn the tools necessary to develop a deeper understanding. Math is not
optional, it is the language by which we describe the structure of the
universe.

~~~
77pt77
> and an educated electrical engineer would not need "help with the math."

For doing EM no. For doing GR or QFT, he would most certainly need help with
the math.

------
dekhn
While I agree with plenty the author wrote, I have seen plenty of people who
are great with math, can speak the language, know how to promote their results
in pubs and conferences, and yet are still completely and totally wrong.

My best example is a smart physics graduate that I went to grad school (in
biophysics) with. An open problem at the time was how motor proteins couple
the energy in ATP hydrolosis to directed motion. I said one day, "hmm, maybe
it works like this..." and she said, "oh no, my advisor and I proved that
mechanism was impossible."

A few years go by, we're getting ready to graduate. I ask her, "so, since you
spent the last 7 years studying motor proteins, how do they work?" And she
told me it was the mechanism I had proposed. I said, "but you disproved
that!". And she said, "well, then I collected data, and it turns out our
assumptions are wrong."

I constantly end up arguing with quantitative people in my own old field- for
example, I used to argue with people who did GWAS, they insisted all their
stats were great and perfect, then Ionnides and others showed their stats were
abysmal, and they were massively overconfident in their results.

This is not to say all the cranks are right- they are almost certainly wrong.
Anybody who attempts to get around the second law of thermodynamics is going
to lose, unless there is something truly and fundamentally wrong with
statistical mechanics.

------
lcvella
That is why I believe society is not getting what it is paying for in physics
and mathematics. Too much of the funds invested in physics knowledge is from
taxpayers money, and all the knowledge produced is useless if we can't get it
back and, with due dedication, understand it. I always felt most of the modern
physics knowledge is completely inaccessible to me.

The latest physics book I could read and understand was one by Einstein
himself, "Relativity: The Special and General Theory", which is 100 years old.

When I tackled to learn quantum mechanics, I couldn't find good accessible
(cost-wise) material, and the supposedly good book appointed by a physicist
friend of mine cost more than $100 on Amazon (which is about 1/3 of the
minimum wage of where country I live). I end up buying the Indian print of the
book much cheaper. But there was no chance I could read it at the time,
because of my lack of calculus basis, what made me watch the entire Udacity
course on differential equations.

Thanks to that, I had the bare minimum to be accepted in a PhD program on
mechanical engineering (I am MSc on Computer Science) to work on computational
fluid dynamics. Now, halfway through an engineering PhD, I believe am (more)
able to tackle the QM book (look all that took me!)

That is why I deeply value the effort of Udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy and
such, because without real efforts to bring actual knowledge to public, in an
accessible way (both cost and didactic-wise), modern physics and mathematics
are a waste of money on private clubs.

~~~
77pt77
> I always felt most of the modern physics knowledge is completely
> inaccessible to me.

Maybe you are just intellectually inadequate.

I'm inadequate to run the 100m in less than 15s or even to finish a marathon
in less than 2h.

Doesn't mean these things are generally inaccessible.

~~~
gsteinb88
Well, the entire human race is inadequate to run a marathon in less than 2h so
far...

~~~
77pt77
You're absolutely right, that was a typo.

I meant 3 hours.

I don't think I could finish in less than a day at all...

------
atemerev
This guy have secured himself so much good karma. Wow. Thank you, from all us
autodidacts.

(I am trying to learn some astrophysics as a hobby. Amateur science is
currently mostly frowned upon).

~~~
neogodless
(girl)

~~~
atemerev
Whoops. My fault. I thought I checked it. I didn't.

------
jxy
It is a good form of communicating sciences. Seriously, more professors should
do it as their contributions to community. Perhaps starting from more reddit
AMA?

~~~
johan_larson
That's a big ask. Scholars tend to be rewarded for their contributions to
advancing the field itself, not for improving relations with outsiders. Heck,
these people can barely be bothered to deal with undergrads, never mind the
general public. And really, they have little to gain from doing so. The
general citizenry doesn't judge research output (publishing), and they don't
directly provide the means of carrying it out (funding), so any attention
directed their way is basically a waste for working scholars.

~~~
nitrogen
It is a big ask as you say, but failing to do so is costing science the trust
of the lay public. A public that doesn't understand science will vote to burn
all the oil, give measles to all the children, and try to mine the moon for
cheese.

~~~
thansharp
Tragedy of the commons. It definitely benefits everyone if some people stood
up, but it's in no one's specific personal interests to be at a comparative
disadvantage due to this.

------
evanwolf
Heh. What I learned as a product manager by watching 100 hours of Hallmark
movies. [https://medium.com/product-hospice/100-hours-of-hallmark-
mov...](https://medium.com/product-hospice/100-hours-of-hallmark-movies-
product-management-lessons-ddc1fca9d3e5)

------
fritzo
I wish there were services for this in other areas. I'd pay to ask
embarrassingly naive questions in fields where my knowledge-to-interest level
is near zero, and where reading the internet has proven ineffective.

------
jsprogrammer
>Sociologists have long tried and failed to draw a line between science and
pseudoscience. In physics, though, that ‘demarcation problem’ is a non-
problem, solved by the pragmatic observation that we can reliably tell an
outsider when we see one.

Sorry, but this is an admission of pseudoscience. All apparently in the name
of committing an ad hominem.

It is commendable that the author is helping others to get answers to their
questions, but this article indicates that there are substantial issues to be
dealt with.

~~~
Analog24
Although it is a bit of a jab, I wouldn't call it an ad hominem.

And this is no way an admission of pseudoscience. She is simply saying that in
physics it's (usually) easy to tell when someone doesn't know what they're
talking about. Mainly because the amount of prerequisite material needed to
understand and contribute to cutting edge physics is likely quite a bit more
than what's required for sociology and other social sciences. This is simply
because physics is a much older subject with a lot more history, this isn't
meant as an attack on social sciences.

The statement you quoted is not even close to an admission of pseudoscience in
physics.

~~~
jsprogrammer
It is exactly an ad hominem. The author literally states that the demarcation
function in physics is dependent on their opinion of the person making the
claim.

~~~
Analog24
> _...demarcation function..._

You're grasping at straws here. This is a blog post, not a publication in a
peer reviewed journal. Furthermore, it is fairly easy for a physicist to form
a reasonable "opinion" about someones grasp of theoretical physics. This
"demarcation function" does not extend to any other aspects of ones opinions
regardless of how much you want to force this meaning on her words.

~~~
jsprogrammer
I don't see what straws I could possibly be grasping; it is literally what the
blog post says.

~~~
Analog24
That's "literally" just how you chose to interpret it. But that's OK as long
as it supports your overarching generalizations about the entire field of
physics based on a blog post.

~~~
jsprogrammer
Could you provide an alternative interpretation of those sentences?

------
Yenrabbit
Semi-relevant xkcd: [http://xkcd.com/1486/](http://xkcd.com/1486/)

------
emmelaich
I think there is a place for speculation in science as long it is clearly
understood as such.

There used to be journal for it; it was fun reading.

Speculations in Science and Technology
[http://link.springer.com/journal/volumesAndIssues/11216](http://link.springer.com/journal/volumesAndIssues/11216)

It only ran for two years, 1997-1998.

------
hardlianotion
The bit that I take from this is a scientist who is taking on a mission to
explain himself fully, to people who make an effort and give a damn. Very easy
to call people like this cranks, and rather hard to make something positive
come out of the engagement in many cases.

I suspect the fact that money is involved goes some way to making this
initiative a success.

------
erdevs
I wonder if this is changing with things like online education and the wealth
of real information and in-depth knowledge on the internet. It seems self-
teaching is much, much more viable today and I imagine that younger
generations of autodidacts might not be so ill-informed on the whole.

~~~
Noseshine
I have taken about 70 courses by now - about 1/3 of them "hard", the rest more
like "Nutrition for Horses", on edX and Coursera mostly.

From the courses currently offered on the major course sites it seems they
limit themselves to courses taught during the first two years of college - and
many courses are dumbed-down to a "general public" level. There are a few
exceptions, for example the quantum mechanics courses on edX, but they really
are exceptions.

You can get more demanding courses on the university learning websites
themselves, for example
[https://lagunita.stanford.edu/](https://lagunita.stanford.edu/) for Stanford.

The breadth of the courses and course-takers is focused on the basics though.
That doesn't mean it's all easy and dumbed-down - a course like "Medical
Neuroscience" on Coursera ( _excellent, by the way, the professor is a
wonderful teacher_ \- [https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-
neuroscience](https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience)) have a
workload of >15 hours/week. It still is "only" an introductory course though.

I think you can sure get the basics via online education, and that means
"university level basics". The main problem I see with more advanced courses
is that you _need_ to test your level of understanding and have it challenged
on a high level, way more than is good for an online course. That's because
those tests, if they are any good, is going to show you the huge gaping holes
you still have in your knowledge, and for an online course that's too
discouraging.

~~~
kaybe
These tests are also really really hard to do automatically.

The usual way here during education is to get a worksheet parallelly to the
lecture every week, work through the problems and hand them in for correction
and grading.

If it's easy, the solution and correction are straight-forward. But if it's
hard, as, say, some mathematical proof, sometimes a lot of knowledge and work
goes into determining the correctness of the solution. And these are the
problems that I feel changed the structure of my mind over the years.

And then, even if things are easy to determine right or wrong, as for a coding
assignment, people still profit immensely from getting good feedback on their
work, from qualified people (and not peer-grading like online courses
occasionally do).

------
TylerH
"None of us makes good money"

$150 an hour is _very_ good money, especially if you have interested parties
sending e-mails that are "piling up" in your inbox.

Get outta here with that nonsense.

------
rupellohn
I recommend 'Physics on the Fringe' for anyone interested in this topic

[http://physicsonthefringe.com/page/about-
book](http://physicsonthefringe.com/page/about-book)

------
dredmorbius
This raises any number of points and questions.

How effectively can we communicate (and pass on to new generations) complex
ideas at all? There's an essay on mathematics PhDs, noting that in any given
seminar of a half-dozen or so people, _you may well have the only six people
in the world who can even understand the topic in the room._ What does it mean
to "know" something _if only one billionth of the global population can even
grasp it_?

There's the question of how to assess the quality of knowledge _within_ a
field. How can laypeople, inlcuding the politicians, voters, and taxpayers who
ultimately pay for research, education, and otherwise support many of these
operations, even assess what it is they're paying for and receiving?

There's the matter of media quality and access. I make absolutely no bones
that I'm a book thief, and praise Alexandra Elbakyan _daily_ (along with Kale
Brewster of the Internet Archive, Reddit's /r/scholar and BookZZ.org) for
providing access to the raw materials of my own research. (Also various
libraries, though they're far less convenient or accessible.) _Information is
a public good._ It has massive positive externalities, it's nonrivalrous, and
_it needs to be disseminated and accessible in order to be useful._ And yet we
lock it away. Which is among the reasons why autodidacts rely on such poor
alternatives as the popular press.

 _Blaming journalists for poor descriptions of scientific concepts doesn 't
fly when it's scientists themselves who are kicking out these concepts._ OK,
to paraphrase other unfortunate social slogans, _not all scientists_. But
many. And yes, _reporters and editors should absolutely be called to task for
sloppy writing and whitewashing crud._

(Ah. I'm remembering a panel, Christopher Hitchens was among the presenters,
where a female writer mentioned her experience writing for a fashion magazine
on social topics -- the original work was hers, but after it had been washed
through many more hands, it was anything but. I think in here:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fkLX58ZWbWw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fkLX58ZWbWw)
Sorry, that's a 2 hour video, I'll see if I can't narrow down the timeframe.
Probably Katha Pollitt. The relevant comments concern writing for _Glamour_ ,
and occur at 14m30s.)

And finally, as I've raised the issue with @schoen below, there's the question
of how best to filter out the sensible cranks from the nuts. Finding _good_
new ideas amongst the many bad ones, and sorting out how to keep from having
to relitigate bullshit, is a Very Hard Problem.

------
lifeisstillgood
This is an awesome example of real down in the dirt science communication.

I'm impressed

------
Analemma_
This is a fun article, and also a useful reminder that although Hacker News
tends to mythologize autodidacts, the boring reality is that in disciplines
other than programming, the overwhelming majority of them are useless cranks.

~~~
dogma1138
Even in programming that holds true, it really depends on what you need to
apply and implement.

Take coding academies the vast majority of them don't even cover basic math
they try to abstract everything and teach you basically how to "paint" or
"construct" with words and a compiler. Code academy graduate do not come out
from their 6 week crash course with grasp on even basic mathematical
principles and tools that are used for programming, and 'autodidacts' aren't
much better.

Sure there will be prodigies that teach themselves "real" computer science
rather than how to build web apps using JavaScript and RoR, but those are the
same people that could be prodigies in any other field as well.

You get coders these days that don't have a basic grasp on what arrays or
matrices are. what is a vector, or what is a binary expression tree is, not
because they are dumb but because they don't know algebra.

The basic "coder" is a 21st century handyman building a landing page is not
much different than building a porch and while it might be painful to hear
building a porch probably requires more thinking than building a landing page
these days.

You can teach yourself programming however you want but you would be at best a
"skillful" operator unless you are truly a unique individual with prodigy
level self learning capabilities and extremely high intelligence. But if you
just learned a "language" (rather than programming and computer science
fundamentals) you are also a pretty useless crank you are just more employable
in the current job market just like a guy who thought himself how to fix a car
50 years ago was.

~~~
Jimmy
>Code academy graduate do not come out from their 6 week crash course with
grasp on even basic mathematical principles and tools that are used for
programming

I wouldn't say that there are any such tools, not the kind that the average
programmer has to have explicit knowledge of. In fact, that's one of the
misconceptions I have to steer people away from, the idea that programming
requires lots of math. Obviously there are applications of programming that
require a lot of math - AI, proof assistants, 3D graphics, image processing,
etc - but if you're just working on business apps then you don't need to know
any math at all.

Source: started as an autodidact, got a 4 year CS degree, am a professional
programmer now.

~~~
dogma1138
The problem is that "programming" is too much of fuzzy term these days. A few
decades ago most programmers were computer scientists which tackled many more
problems than just programming.

Programming is more of a tool these days, if you study math/physics you learn
programming not to develop software but if only to work with matlab.

At the end programming can be classified as a general purpose skills not
unlike using any other tool or any other daily skill, it's harder to define
because programming is considerably more bigger than the average skillset.

One of the reason I like to equate it to being a handyman is because handymen
also have a wide range of skills and specializations some are better
electricians, some are better plumbers some are better builders but the ally
share a pretty similar core toolkit (some pun intended).

I am pretty well aware that for the most day to day "mundane" programming task
math isn't needed, it really depends on what you end up doing.

------
ARothfusz
This is exactly developer support for "open source" physics.

