Re: Quantum mystics

On 10/06/2024 5:18 pm, Jeff Layman wrote:

On 10/06/2024 01:00, bitrex wrote:

On 6/9/2024 5:07 PM, Martin Brown wrote:
>

That's hardly usual, or a reason to call him wrong. He won the Nobel
Prize just to get free plane tickets.

>
I'm not quite sure what he has said that annoyed JB - usually any
popular science programme for a general audience dumbs down quantum
mechanics to a point where it is completely unrecognisable to
professional physicists.

>
The general public tends to be exceptionally mathematics-averse. Even
many people with advanced degrees in fields outside the hard sciences
tend to be pretty math-averse.

 Absolutely correct. I was ok with mathematics in school until we started on calculus. I could not, and still cannot, understand concepts such as "vanishingly small".

It helps if you get exposed to finite differences. In my Ph.D. work I had to do a certain amount of numerical integration, using small but finite steps.
To prove that the steps were small enough, I cut the step size by a factor of three and got an integral that was the same out to five significant digits (and the difference was probably rounding error in the digital arithmetic).

I learnt to use the formulae for differentiation and integration and passed my exams, but my eyes clouded over then as far as abstract mathematical concepts are concerned, and they've never cleared! It's quite possible that I have to be able to imagine most things to understand them, and, to me, mathematics is just not within my imagination.
 

There's a modest subset of the population that's math-averse but is not
averse to trying to learn something qualitative about quantum physics or
the Riemann Hypothesis or some other mathematical aspect of the hard
sciences and enjoy the satisfaction of feeling like they know
_something_ more than they went in, even if the details aren't within
their grasp.

 I'm interested in almost anything scientific, even if I can't understand it. Perhaps it's better that way - I don't have to see the wood for the trees!

There's no wood without trees.

In contrast to the rather large subset of the population, even people
with college degrees, who are OK with not knowing the first thing about
such topics, and tend to prefer it that way.

It saves time. It probably isn't a wise choice.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
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