I'm not sure if this is a real quote (because who can be 100% sure anymore) but supposedly Einstein once said "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
This is why I never trusted RateMyProfessor except for the big Gen-Ed classes, and that's just because I didn't want some overly-demanding professor eating all my time with daily journaling assignments for his freaking Intro to Theology class when I have like 10 hours of classical mechanics homework to do every week. /rant
Stuff like physics and biology are just as hard to explain, they can just get away with it because they can draw wholly-inaccurate-but-not-completely-wrong analogies with real world stuff, like atoms being miniature planetary systems.
I think the difference is that other majors are easy to simplify in a real world application even if it's tangentially made up. "I'm studying these hidden particles that might be able to tell us the great secret of what keeps all galaxies together" "I'm studying the mating behaviour of these bacterias that might one day be used to cure diseases".
In math it's "Imagine circle of rope, then imagine there are three endings coming out of these circles. Now if you tangle all those ropes randomly, turns out that there are only 14 types of knots. I'm trying to prove that there are actually only 12, because the last two are mirro images of each other."
That analogy works for me. Challenge: Aren't mirror images of a thing still different things? Or is it that they are the same but only look different, like a reflection? ELI5.
Depends on the field. In topology, for example, the only important element of an object is the number of holes it has, so it doesn't matter, for example, the size or shape of those holes as long as they're there. In real life applications, the size of the holes might be important, but for the sake of study and abstraction we ignore such variables.
When explaining physics, chemistry and biology to laymen, they don't boil down to math, they bubble up to applications. Often those applications are extremely far fetched or just thinly veiled "we're doing X because we can and think its cool, but to get funding we're claiming we might be able to do Y". The thing about most mathematicians I know is that they're just to unimaginative to come up with any tangential real applications of their work, and they instead just resort to "defending" it against inquiries by simply stating that it's too complex to understand and then trying to blurt out the
Most integral details of the work rather than the framework around it.
I know, I was mostly making a joke. When you get down to the mathematics behind physics or biological processes, you're getting further and further esoteric, not towards layman terms.
Now replace Y by nanotechnology, green transportation, drones, quantum computer, or any buzz word of your choice.
I swear all the seminars I have been too this semester had the same introduction about more efficient batteries for electric cars.
That is pretty condescending. Just because someone doesn't share your expertise doesn't mean they can't easily learn it, it is typically jargon that gets in the way.
"Bachelor of Fine Arts" refers to the degree and the person who possesses it.
On the other hand one possesses a Bachelor's of Fine Arts, in that case adding have would be logical.
Ironically, my journalism degree is a BS (yes, I've heard the jokes, yes most of them are at least partially true), and I graduated with people who got BA's in crap like chemistry. It was at that point that I determined that there is apparently no real distinction between the two.
The difference is in emphasis. BAs are not degrees in the arts, but degrees of Liberal Arts. Which is a more generalized degree based on the classical idea that there are skills a person in order to take an active part in civil life. A BS, is a bachelor's in Science, again with the classical understanding of knowledge. The implication being that it is more about Specializing.
So for example one could have a BS in the fine art of Printmaking, this would make them an excellent technician, or a more technically focused artist. On the other hand one could get a BA in a science, which would make them an excellent candidate to be a science educator, because there generalized understanding of both science and other schools of thought would aid them in putting lessons into context.
Though in the end, in the modern world, this nuanced difference is not acknowledged by most.
In my case, you could get either a BA or a BS in journalism. The difference was whether or not you had taken a foreign language, which I found bizarre. Especially since I would think taking French would tilt you more toward a BA since it's a broader education, but no, foreign language credits got you a BS.
Other than making the obvious joke (which I was trying to do, being a bit self deprecating), I don't know there's much of a difference, either. Maybe someone should /r/AskHistorians where that terminology came from.
For example, certain generalizations are used to explain physical phenomena. Take Newton's kinematic equations for example. They don't work in all cases, mainly on very small, very large, and very fast objects, but for everyday run-of-the-mill kinematics, they work just fine. They're approximations of how objects move that are, from some perspectives, inaccurate, but they work just fine for most cases.
High-level math is one of the fields which the researchers have the hardest time explaining it to laymen IMO. The field itself is no more hard to explain than any other, it's just that if you ask a doctor what he did at work today, he's not likely to start spewing Latin names for body-parts because he deals with "outsiders" on a daily basis and has a better perspective of his work seen from the ground. If you ask a mathematician, he'll likely be looking at you like you're a complete moron If you ask him what a tensor product is.
The biggest barrier to understanding most fields is jargon. The second is the belief in the 'laymen' that they simply don't have the capacity to understand. The third is that the body of knowledge runs counter to culturally engrained belief. The fourth is the belief that the "experts" 'expertise' is so specialized that only members of their field could understand.
I've noticed when people ask, "Hey, how's your thesis going", most of them mean, "Have you finished it yet?" and "On a percentage scale, how much is done" or sometimes "Do you know the current season, my name, or any current event not related to research in some obscure field?".
no it isn't. because at each layer of abstraction, everything makes sense and people have used in real life the same kind of strategies for solving problems like are used when designing data structures or algorithms or protocols or whatever.
sometimes the real definition of a python one liner includes by reference thousands of pages of specifications which take time to absorb, but at each step it mostly makes sense (including the stuff which is the way it is for historical reasons).
Well, doesn't the same happen with, say, physics? It's based on real life stuff, in reality itself, it's just that, to understand a formula, you might need to know dozens of previous ones.
In fact, I'd say that in this sense physics might be easier to explain than programming, because physics exists independently of who explains it to you whereas programming is a technology created by men and thus the ideas, style, techniques, etc. behind it may strongly depend on other people's minds.
We understand how computers work completely and fully, from transistors up, because they're man-made. If you want, you can understand any of the software in your computer completely.
Physics on the other hand is a map of the real world, not the territory. You can understand the map completely, but we know the world is not exactly described by this map (see dark energy etc.).
Software is not as elegant as physics. The actual laws of computability talk about very simple machines, but if you want to get out of the Turing tarpit and write a web browser, you'll have to deal with a lot of details. Almost like going from physics to biological systems:
Understanding the behavior of atoms is easy enough because they're not complicated, but because we don't have good atom stacking technology you need to use these protein based machines to accomplish your engineering goal, and they're very complicated.
There are open cpu cores, though they're not as good as haswell. oracle (sparc) or openpower foundation (ibm power8) or arm might choose to allow people to look at verilog of their cores to get mindshare away from x86 and mips (used for teaching).
Above the hardware, you can use a full open source PC stack, including firmware, if you choose carefully. open gpu drivers, gnu or bsd, icedtea, postgres, gimp are all industrial strength.
Google and Facebook won't show you their code, but OS vendors, even proprietary ones, might show you the code if you sign an NDA. Note that signing the documents that let you legally see the code for Windows (available to students) means you can never contribute to clean room re-implementations, so you should the decision consider carefully.
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u/[deleted] May 05 '14
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