Back to my very occasional tweets about @seanmcarroll's #BiggestIdeas new book. Physics, equations included, for lay audiences.
Just finished ch 1, conservation. Two key ideas emerge: conservation laws are built into a universe w. symmetries, like the one we inhabit, and...
Just finished ch 1, conservation. Two key ideas emerge: conservation laws are built into a universe w. symmetries, like the one we inhabit, and...
2/ the physicist's toolkit, or rather, approach, what Sean calls "spherical cow philosophy," is not (only) a joke, but also, in a way, turns on a basic property of reality.* Crucially, as Sean notes, that property doesn't obtain when stuff gets complicated...
*I know. Let it be.
*I know. Let it be.
3/ Biology, or the human sciences do not (generally) respond in the same way as physical systems do to the heuristic of simplifying a problem until it's solvable and then add back in more realistic complexity.
That's actually a long and details-matter argument...
That's actually a long and details-matter argument...
4/ See, e.g., @paulkrugman's hymns of praise to toy models. But the steps from Krugman's toys to the social world and/or policy are different intellectual operations (again, mostly) than, say, Sean's example of the sequence of ideas building up to conservation of momentum...
5/ So one pleasure of this deceptively simple-seeming first chapter is the intellectual history/philosophy of science that comes along for the ride. The other, for me, was the gentle and entirely comprehensible easing into the mathematical expression of physical concepts...
6/ Conservation of momentum is a GREAT place to start thinking about patterns in the physical world because it is both immediately recognizable from my own daily experience and because it can be expressed an equation that maps directly onto that narrative experience...
7/ Put another way: math tells stories in a particularly precise genre form. When teaching people who are unfamiliar with the langua formal nature of such stories, starting with one that moves transparently between its own form and its translation into English is very helpf
8/ helpful...
Which is to say--Sean's stated ambition in the introduction is playing out as promised so far. /fin.
Which is to say--Sean's stated ambition in the introduction is playing out as promised so far. /fin.
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