
A New Theory to Explain the Higgs Mass - digital55
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150527-a-new-theory-to-explain-the-higgs-mass/
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sixQuarks
The bleeding edge of science has gotten so complex, I'm starting to worry we
don't have enough people who understand even a fraction of it. Quantum
mechanics is confusing enough as it is, but now we're getting into hidden
dimensions and fields that go way beyond this. Has it always been like this?
How many people in the world actually understand this stuff?

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mikekchar
At one time I was in a physics program at university until I discovered that I
couldn't understand physics. I changed to computer science ;-). My experience,
though, was that most people I talked to had only a cursory understanding of
actual physics. What they _really_ understood was the math.

Like I said, I sucked pretty badly at physics but my impression is that people
tend to jump back and forth between imagining the physics, modelling it in
math, making predictions based on the math, imagining again what the physics
would look like, ad infinitum. So for complex problems, I don't think anyone
has a whole physics problem in their head at once and are reasoning about it
at that level. They just have pieces and use the math as a way of swapping
parts of the problem in and out of their head (if that makes any sense).

I think that's one of the biggest problems with popular descriptions of
physics. It doesn't make any sense without the math, but average people don't
have the math background. So the descriptions make absolutely no sense. Often
you get people who are interested in the physics (but without training)
imagining all sorts of crazy things because they have built their
understanding on these kinds of nonsense descriptions.

It's been this way for quite a long time. Newton had use new mathematical
techniques (calculus) to understand things like the force of gravity. Even if
you go back to Archimedes, I wonder how much of his reasoning about density
was based on modelling it with math and how much was based on intuition about
the physical universe.

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winestock
>At one time I was in a physics program at university until I discovered that
I couldn't understand physics. I changed to computer science ;-). My
experience, though, was that most people I talked to had only a cursory
understanding of actual physics. What they really understood was the math.

The science fiction author, Jerry Pournelle, who has a measured IQ of 180,
once complained to Richard Feynman, "I don't understand quantum mechanics."
Feynman replied, "That's okay, Jerry; neither do I."

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coliveira
It could be said that nobody truly understands quantum mechanics, for the
simple reason that human beings evolved to live under classical physics. Like
any other scientific field, however, this doesn't preclude us from conducting
experiments and studying the mathematical laws that model the results. In this
respect, it doesn't make any difference if we have an intuitive understanding
or not.

~~~
Retra
By that reasoning, nobody understands classical physics either. Aristotle's
model of gravitation survived for a couple thousand years, basically
uncontested.

I get pretty irritated when people say nobody can or does understand quantum
physics. Your intuition does no better with classical physics, or any other
physics. You build an intuition through study. Almost none of us would
probably even be able to discover conservation of momentum without it being
laid out by someone else.

~~~
coliveira
And this is what I said above, we can achieve a form of understanding by using
experiments and a theoretical foundation to explain the results.

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archibaldJ
Related: a SixtySymbols video on axion
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VxcTXud-
Tg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VxcTXud-Tg)

