[HN Gopher] Don't Forget Intuition: The art of doing science
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Don't Forget Intuition: The art of doing science
Author : Hooke
Score : 58 points
Date : 2023-07-30 19:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theamericanscholar.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (theamericanscholar.org)
| emmender1 wrote:
| This is my gripe with high school (and college) education..
|
| knowledge which took hundreds of years to discover is imparted in
| capsules to students - the history of how knowledge was
| discovered is likely more important and interesting to learn than
| knowledge itself...
|
| cases in point: heliocentric theory has a rich and dramatic
| history, and so does galois theory
|
| Quote from article..
|
| As someone who writes about science history, I have long grumbled
| about how misleading modern scientific papers are. I understand
| the need to present scientific findings in a clean, concise way,
| but the papers also omit all the false starts, blind alleys,
| broken equipment, and dumb mistakes that beset real scientific
| research every day. By omitting all the human stuff, the papers
| fail to explain how science really gets done.
| rubidium wrote:
| Yeah but you know plenty of how science gets done if you go do
| science. The goal of a scientific paper is to concisely convey
| what novel thing has been discovered. It is not to convey how
| science gets done.
|
| PhD thesis are sometimes good places to look if you want more
| of the gory details.
|
| Edit: and if you ever take a physics lab in trying to measure
| the heat capacity of water or speed of light you learn a bunch
| about how science actually works.
| burnished wrote:
| What? Sharing the difficulties you encountered is helpful for
| other researchers and for replication studies. The goal of a
| paper is to share your findings in a manner that is clear and
| helps advance knowledge in your field, and frequently the
| most important thing you can share is how you performed your
| experiment followed by why you chose to perform that
| experiment and whether it conformed to your expectations or
| not.
|
| Having personally gone through a couple years of lab classes;
| no, not really. Lord knows your professors may try but at
| least in my experience the profundity is lost on students.
| You get a lovely tour of scientific concensus, but most
| people see the experiments as being fore-ordained or like a
| recipe.
|
| To put it more simply university lab classes demonstrate so
| many things that are true that people sometimes never realize
| that science is a method for disproving things.
| mercurialsolo wrote:
| Intuition and observation - are the cornerstones of the
| scientific process. While i do believe we don't have shortage of
| either, it's when the two meet do we have real breakthroughs. We
| posit theories and new ways of thinking by observation from other
| places. Often times, that's why scientists tend to have varied
| interests.
| ttonkytonk wrote:
| A review of _In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex
| Systems_ by Giorgio Parisi
| someguy7250 wrote:
| I'm still hoping for a quantum gravity theory that can basically
| explain Einstein's spacetime using intuitive languages. (I'm
| probably stupid, but I'm hoping it's all just chunks like a game
| server, with delays between chunks)
| bowsamic wrote:
| Einstein's general theory of relativity is already extremely
| intuitive compared to even non-relativistic Quantum Mechanics
| (which literally has no accepted intuitive description).
| Theories of Quantum Gravity are way more unintuitive
| someguy7250 wrote:
| > Theories of Quantum Gravity are way more unintuitive
|
| Hence my desire for an intuitive one.
| bowsamic wrote:
| You would need an intuitive theory of quantum mechanics
| first, which doesn't exist
| someguy7250 wrote:
| Yeah. This is all just basically me talking nonsense. I'm
| not educated enough and further discussions would only
| yield nonsense.
|
| (But if you are curious, the idea is that space is
| divided into chunks. Crossing chunks or propogating
| EM/gravitational fields through a chunk causes a delay,
| which means the particle's inertial frame loses time. And
| even if particles are traveling at infinite speed inside
| a chunk, that delay causes an effective speed limit.
| That's the speed of light. Similarly, there could be
| other ideas that also "backport" the entire spacetime
| theory onto quantum.)
| bowsamic wrote:
| We can already do quantum field theory on a curved
| spacetime, so part of the backporting is already done.
| The problem is partly the quantisation of spacetime that
| you point out. Gravity can't be quantised like the other
| forces, it just doesn't work
| someguy7250 wrote:
| I don't really know where it went wrong with the real
| theories. But, when I imagine quantized gravity in my
| head, I don't imagine having a carrier particle
| (graviton).
|
| Rather, it feels like gravity is special and the chunks
| of spacetime themselves are carrying information about
| the gravitational field.
|
| My imagination is odd because it's based on how I would
| write a distributed game server. (It doesn't make sense
| to simulate gravity pairs between every single pair of
| particles. This isn't just slow, it doesn't scale if the
| universe expands. But it makes sense to precalculate
| gravity field as a chunked map and then update one chunk
| at a time.) (You can ask the same about light/EM but
| light hits only some of the things and can cause complex
| local interactions at the scale of electron orbits. When
| gravity changes, it's very macroscopic instead. So I
| wanted to treat them differently)
| bowsamic wrote:
| Your imaginations don't have anything to do with actually
| having a quantum theory of gravity that works at high
| energies
| someguy7250 wrote:
| I know. But I don't know where to start reading if I want
| to learn more about what's really going on
| elashri wrote:
| Do you consider the quantum mechanics as an intuitive theory (
| In whatever definition of intuition you think of)? Because if
| you don't, then any Quantum Gravity wouldn't be for you.
| someguy7250 wrote:
| Quantum is not the most intuitive thing to discuss. And
| frankly a quantum theory without complex, solid maths behind
| it might as well be a fairy tale.
|
| In the context of how atoms work without having electrons
| that lose charge and fall into nuclei, how different atoms
| absorb / emit different colors/wavelengths of light:
|
| The simplest theory is that they just are this way. Just fix
| up the existing "codebase" to accommodate for this observed
| fact. So they just said electrons has discrete energy states
| and orbits to choose from.
|
| It's literally the simplest way to accommodate the observed
| fact that electrons do not fall into nuclei.
|
| It led to super complex Maths and predictions about black
| holes, and seemingly conflicts with general relativity. But,
| Can you think of anything more intuitive?
| burnished wrote:
| Discrete quanta of light was my 'hmmmm' moment, at least
| when it occurred to me to interpret it as a rubbish hack
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The photon model of light is pretty well demanded by the
| existence of the photoelectric effect.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| What's interesting is that all of science rests ultimately on
| intuition.
|
| The laws of logic and reasoning rest on axioms which basically
| rely on the intuition that they are true.
| burnished wrote:
| You're thinking of math. That the math we've developed leads to
| intuitive useful results, or that it is useful for making
| predictions about the world is no coincidence. If science rests
| on anything it rests on the belief that the world operates
| through repeatable principles, that you can repeat an
| experiment and expect the same result.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > "science rests on anything it rests on the belief that the
| world operates through repeatable principles"
|
| Where does the principle come from?
| burnished wrote:
| I suspect the principle arises from elimination; the other
| prospects are too daunting to consider. "The universe is
| chaotic and false and your memories are lies because you
| were just created whole as you are", for example, sort of
| ends the conversation. Doesn't leave you much room to try
| and eat something tasty. And evidently even a little belief
| in a coherent universe is self reinforcing.
|
| So I suppose the principle comes from the pragmatism
| involved with being embodied agents with needs in a hostile
| environment.
| markusde wrote:
| This is slightly misleading. "All of science" doesn't rely on
| intuition-- it relies on the scientific method. Intuition
| guides how we develop our models but ultimately there _is_ a
| real forcing function in the sense that the models need to hold
| up to experiment.
|
| An example of why this matters: string theory. AFAICT It's a
| field that is built with a clear(ish) intuition and rigorous
| use of logic, but because it is experimentally unverifiable the
| field has never really moved past conjecture.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > it relies on the scientific method
|
| Which come from logic/reasoning which relies on intuition.
| Isamu wrote:
| What? How so?
|
| Explanations of reasoning and math often appeal to
| intuition as a shortcut and to connect with the student,
| but that is not the foundation.
| burnished wrote:
| Nitpick: If it isnt experimental it isnt science.
| trostaft wrote:
| Intuition and rigor are the 'yin and yang' of conducting
| interesting applied math research (specializing to my field
| because that's all I can speak to). Initial research is almost
| entirely driven by intuition. Experimentation, testing, trying
| new ideas, all founded on the basis of rigor but in the heat of
| the moment (read: weeks) it's not really what I'm thinking about.
| Then, during testing and validation, I come back and properly
| build up the rigor blocks; revealing both errors and potential
| new directions forward. Cycle over and over, both compose a
| robust and creative scientific process. Ideally.
| tuanx5 wrote:
| Great article -- it calls to mind for me a quote I learned of
| through John Ousterhout: "Use your intuition to ask questions,
| not to answer them". Science is the follow through, but intuition
| is the start.
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