NoFreeWill posted:

space fetishism is worse than religion, at least religion puts you in touch with a tradition and community with positive values.

guidoanselmi posted:

gwarp posted:

looking at pictures of the universe and other popular-physics stuff always upsets me because i know i will never be able to do anything beyond simply "looking at the pictures." physical science is math, plain and simple, without mathematics it is all utterly meaningless.

so i was a shitty math student but ended up in physics because i eventually understand the formalism after using my intuition in parameterizing the physical system. i honestly feel that with the right teacher, learning "advanced" math (calc, diffy q, linear algebra, etc) is possible. the problem is is that math education in this fucking nation sucks. probably sucks everywhere.

regardless, the more you actually get into the logical and mathematical formalism the more it becomes clear that it really is just a half-ass description vs representation of reality. a good example of this is one of the things that shook my faith in science - the minus signs in the solutions for mass in the dirac equation that is the equation of motion for fermion particles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation. well there's no such thing as negative mass (or negative time, i suppose) - but that's what the mathematical formalism enforces that such a quantity must exist. now, we've understood these negative mass solutions to be for antiparticles and that is accepted convention. but the point remains unchanged - the math predicts/suggests something effectively impossible. misconstruing the suggestion we "discover" the existence of antiparticles, which is nifty but inexplicable. we use our hindsight to slap together some rationalization, which we keep consistent henceforth.

i wont even touch on renormalization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization (in part because after a year of QFT im not in any position to really explain anything meaningfully but its pretty...weird).

shame they wont talk about the quirks of physics in things like cosmos where the beauty of nature doesn't always have parallels in the formalism.

edit: i guess this serves as a personal reflection to myself more than anything else. i will say despite practically being voodoo as far as i understand it, dimensional regularization - the process in which you can solve infinite integrals for feynman in some dimension by making the dimensions a interaction occurs in arbitrary - and doing the math - and then setting back to the original dimension is utterly brilliant and beautiful.

i kinda agree and kinda disagree. i agree that math is "just" representation but it's a representation of structure which can definitely exist in the physical world. it's the best tool anyone has for examining, in extreme detail, what the consequences of a specific type of structure and it provides a medium for these structures to interact. for example, i would interpret the "negative" mass in the dirac equation more as an "effective" negative mass that appears if you use that formalism. tbh i don't think it's that different from talking about effective masses of electrons or any of the other particle-like excitations in condensed matter. is a hole a "real" thing, in and of itself? who cares? how can a gap in a structure have mass? you can treat them formally as such and then get physically verifiable results, and the physics is in understanding why that formalism works in the first place. i probably have a pretty different perspective, though, because i did a math degree before i started doing any sort of physics. tbh learning about differential geometry (especially ideas like tangent spaces/bundles) makes field theory a lot easier to understand (what's a vector field? it's an assignment of a vector in R^3 to each point in R^3, and so on).

re: renormalization and feynman's fancy math tricks, i think that these sorts of techniques are very interesting because they make some extremely complicated problem soluble by partitioning them into more or less independent components which can be solved and then putting everything back together (in some sense). the way in which this partitioning is done lets you examine the physical significance of each of those partitions separately and then in reassembling the original problem you can understand how important each of these effects are in relation to one another. but especially in subjects as complex and involved as qft or stat mech there are lots of different ways of approaching a problem, different partitions, but they all relate to the same problem in some sense and ideas and interpretations from one way of partitioning the problem can inform your understanding of other ways of partitioning it. im not really sure what else to make of that but it's definitely interesting.

c_man posted:

i kinda agree and kinda disagree

yeah i do see where youre coming from and i agree/disagree, as well. i was a little glib in my post talking about the dirac equation - but ultimately i feel that the levels to which the math is interpretational is pretty disquieting.

obviously it works but it's a wonder to me, in that good but disquieting way, that it even does.

NoFreeWill posted:

When all of the oil runs out and all of the increasingly expensive scientific instruments used to make discoveries are inoperable what will scientists do instead??

This is an amazing quote. Really inspiring

daddyholes posted:

i like Sagan a lot but i never understood why a bunch of liberal atheists find that photo & essay comforting. its about how we need to shape the fuck up because the implications are terrifying

i thought it was about how nothing has ever mattered so we should all just follow his example and smokke weed til we die