The Scientific Method played a role—physicists could check their results against real-world data—but that’s mostly just checking the answer. The hard part was to figure out which answer to check in the first place, and that involved informal mathematical arguments.
Do you expect these less legible techniques to generalize well outside of physics, especially places where checking the answer is impossible or prohibitively expensive? Maybe the reason these techniques are widely and successfully used in physics is because the answers can eventually be checked, which limit the extent to which the techniques can be misused/abused?
That’s a natural hypothesis. A couple reasons to expect otherwise:
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.)
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.
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.
I thought the meme was that physicists think they can ride into town and make sweeping contributions with a mere glance at the problem, but reality doesn’t pan out that way.
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?
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.
If you suppose that physics tries to deal with the whole of reality in one gulp, then its ability to come up with simple general rules would be remarkable. But actually , physics deals with extremely simplified and idealised situations … frictionless planes, free fall in a vacuum, and so on. Even experiments strive to simplify the natural messiness of reality into something where only one parameter changes at a time
(This is partly a response to the comment above, but I got kind of carried away.)
The Standard Model of particle physics accounts for everyday life (except gravity) in ridiculous detail, including all the “natural messiness” you have in mind (except gravity). It consists of some simple and unique (but mathematically tricky) assumptions called “quantum field theory” and “relativity”, plus the following details, which completely specify the theory: * the gauge group is SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) (or “the product of the three simplest things you could write down”) * the matter particles break parity symmetry, using the simplest set of charges that works * there are three copies of each matter particle * there is also a scalar doublet * the 20ish real-valued parameters implied by the above list have values which you can find by doing 20ish experiments.
I dare anybody to give a specification of, say, all of known organic chemistry or geology with a list that short. You don’t need to spell out any mathematical details, so long as a mathematician could plausibly have invented it without being inspired by physical reality (which are the rules I’m playing by in this comment—I think QFT, relativity, and concepts like “gauge group” and “parity symmetry” that I assume knowledge of are all things math could/would have produced eventually).
In some sense I’m handwaving past the hard part, but I think the remarkable thing about physics is that the hard part is entirely math; if you did enough math in a cave without observing anything about the physical world, you would emerge with the kind of perspective from which the known laws of physics (except gravity) seem extremely parsimonious. (Gravity is also parsimonious but sort of stands alone for now.) On the other hand, if you go do a lot of experiments instead, the laws of physics will seem bizarre and complicated. Which I admit is kind of a strange fact! It’s not clear that “math parsimony” is the same concept as, say, Turing-machine-based Kolmogorov complexity, and it definitely isn’t anybody’s intuitive notion of “simplicity”.
And of course, quite a lot of the “natural messiness” of the world is captured by even simpler Newtonian-mechanics models, although chemistry becomes a kind of nasty black box from a Newtonian perspective.
You are responding as though I said something like “physics doesn’t work at all”, when I actually said it works via idealisations and approximations. To talk of Effective Field Theories concedes my point, since EFTs are by definition approximations .
You said “extremely simplified and idealised situations … frictionless planes, free fall in a vacuum, and so on”. That’s a pretty different ballpark than, say, every phenomenon any human before the 1990s had any knowledge of, in more detail than you can see under any microscope (except gravity).
Do you consider everything you’ve experienced in your entire life to have happened in “extremely simplified and idealised situations”?
This is true of the physics most people learn in secondary school, before calculus is introduced. But I don’t think it’s true of anyone you might call a physicist. I’m confused by the chip you seem to have on your shoulder re physics.
Calculus isn’t a magic trick that allows you to dispense with idealisations and approximations. You can start dealing with friction and air resistance, but you don’t get one equation that is completely precise and applicable to anything.
I don’t have a chip on my shoulder about physics: everyone else has a halo effect
Do you expect these less legible techniques to generalize well outside of physics, especially places where checking the answer is impossible or prohibitively expensive? Maybe the reason these techniques are widely and successfully used in physics is because the answers can eventually be checked, which limit the extent to which the techniques can be misused/abused?
That’s a natural hypothesis. A couple reasons to expect otherwise:
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.)
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.
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.
I thought the meme was that physicists think they can ride into town and make sweeping contributions with a mere glance at the problem, but reality doesn’t pan out that way.
Relevant XKCD.
That is indeed a meme. Though if the physicists’ attempts consistently failed, then biologists would not joke about physicists being like gunslingers.
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?
If you suppose that physics tries to deal with the whole of reality in one gulp, then its ability to come up with simple general rules would be remarkable. But actually , physics deals with extremely simplified and idealised situations … frictionless planes, free fall in a vacuum, and so on. Even experiments strive to simplify the natural messiness of reality into something where only one parameter changes at a time
(This is partly a response to the comment above, but I got kind of carried away.)
The Standard Model of particle physics accounts for everyday life (except gravity) in ridiculous detail, including all the “natural messiness” you have in mind (except gravity). It consists of some simple and unique (but mathematically tricky) assumptions called “quantum field theory” and “relativity”, plus the following details, which completely specify the theory:
* the gauge group is SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) (or “the product of the three simplest things you could write down”)
* the matter particles break parity symmetry, using the simplest set of charges that works
* there are three copies of each matter particle
* there is also a scalar doublet
* the 20ish real-valued parameters implied by the above list have values which you can find by doing 20ish experiments.
I dare anybody to give a specification of, say, all of known organic chemistry or geology with a list that short. You don’t need to spell out any mathematical details, so long as a mathematician could plausibly have invented it without being inspired by physical reality (which are the rules I’m playing by in this comment—I think QFT, relativity, and concepts like “gauge group” and “parity symmetry” that I assume knowledge of are all things math could/would have produced eventually).
In some sense I’m handwaving past the hard part, but I think the remarkable thing about physics is that the hard part is entirely math; if you did enough math in a cave without observing anything about the physical world, you would emerge with the kind of perspective from which the known laws of physics (except gravity) seem extremely parsimonious. (Gravity is also parsimonious but sort of stands alone for now.) On the other hand, if you go do a lot of experiments instead, the laws of physics will seem bizarre and complicated. Which I admit is kind of a strange fact! It’s not clear that “math parsimony” is the same concept as, say, Turing-machine-based Kolmogorov complexity, and it definitely isn’t anybody’s intuitive notion of “simplicity”.
And of course, quite a lot of the “natural messiness” of the world is captured by even simpler Newtonian-mechanics models, although chemistry becomes a kind of nasty black box from a Newtonian perspective.
The SM is itself a kludge. It’s not a satisfactory TOE for a bunch of reasons besides gravity.
It is definitely not a TOE, but it is a successful EFT that accounts for everything except gravity/cosmology.
You are responding as though I said something like “physics doesn’t work at all”, when I actually said it works via idealisations and approximations. To talk of Effective Field Theories concedes my point, since EFTs are by definition approximations .
You said “extremely simplified and idealised situations … frictionless planes, free fall in a vacuum, and so on”. That’s a pretty different ballpark than, say, every phenomenon any human before the 1990s had any knowledge of, in more detail than you can see under any microscope (except gravity).
Do you consider everything you’ve experienced in your entire life to have happened in “extremely simplified and idealised situations”?
This is true of the physics most people learn in secondary school, before calculus is introduced. But I don’t think it’s true of anyone you might call a physicist. I’m confused by the chip you seem to have on your shoulder re physics.
Calculus isn’t a magic trick that allows you to dispense with idealisations and approximations. You can start dealing with friction and air resistance, but you don’t get one equation that is completely precise and applicable to anything.
I don’t have a chip on my shoulder about physics: everyone else has a halo effect