High dimensional world: to find something as useful as e.g. Fourier methods by brute-force guess-and-check would require an exponentially massive amount of search, and is unlikely to have ever happened at all. Therefore we should expect that it was produced by a method which systematically produces true/useful things more often than random chance, not just by guess-and-check with random guessing. (Einstein’s Arrogance is saying something similar.)
I don’t think this contradict the hypothesis that “Physicists course-correct by regularly checking their answers”. After all, the reason Fourier methods and others tricks kept being used is because they somehow worked a lot of the time. Similarly, I expect (maybe wrongly) that there was a bunch of initial fiddling before they got the heuristics to work decently. If you can’t check your answer, the process of refinement that these ideas went through might be harder to replicate.
Physicists have a track record of successfully applying physics-like methods in other fields (biology, economics, psychology, etc). This is not symmetric—i.e. we don’t see lots of biologists applying biology methods to physics, the way we see physicists applying physics methods to biology. We also don’t see this sort of generalization between most other field-pairs—e.g. we don’t see lots of biologists in economics, or vice versa.
The second point sounds stronger than the first, because the first can be explained in the fact that biological systems (for example) are made of physical elements, but not the other way around. So you should expect that biology has not that much to say about physics. Still, one could say that it’s not obvious physics would have relevant things to say about biology because of the complexity and the abstraction involved.
Relatedly: I once heard a biologist joke that physicists are like old western gunslingers. Every now and then, a gang of them rides into your field, shoots holes in all your theories, and then rides off into the sunset. Despite the biologist’s grousing, I would indeed call that sort of thing successful generalization of the methods of physics.
This makes me wonder if the most important skills of physicists is to have strong enough generators to provide useful criticism in a wide range of fields?
I don’t think this contradict the hypothesis that “Physicists course-correct by regularly checking their answers”. After all, the reason Fourier methods and others tricks kept being used is because they somehow worked a lot of the time. Similarly, I expect (maybe wrongly) that there was a bunch of initial fiddling before they got the heuristics to work decently. If you can’t check your answer, the process of refinement that these ideas went through might be harder to replicate.
The second point sounds stronger than the first, because the first can be explained in the fact that biological systems (for example) are made of physical elements, but not the other way around. So you should expect that biology has not that much to say about physics. Still, one could say that it’s not obvious physics would have relevant things to say about biology because of the complexity and the abstraction involved.
This makes me wonder if the most important skills of physicists is to have strong enough generators to provide useful criticism in a wide range of fields?