There's some physics forums I lurk and occasionally post in, and every time the discussion goes beyond physics, holy shit are their opinions dumb as fuck. Just getting someone to understand a simple point that anyone could understand with like 2 sentences just feels like wading through mud with them because every time anything seems to challenge one of their preconceived opinions at all (or if they just don't understand it because they're out of touch) they get annoyed, and then they fixate on irrelevant parts of your point until you have to explain that part of your point again and again and again, and then everyone forgets what it was even about. Especially the boomers in there.
Then there's the ones "helping" people, who will basically act like they are doing a MASSIVE courtesy to you by explaining things, so they'll put people through the shredder for misunderstanding something or for phrasing the question in a way that isn't absolutely perfectly 100% crystal clear as if their compiler is giving an error or something.
And it's not just people in forums, like almost all the professors I know are also just complete morons about anything even slightly unrelated to their specialty.
Why are science nerds like that, I fucking hate it. Like holy shit grow up >:(
big ambitions: aka getting a degree that is hard to get employed under, genius
I have a BS in Physics and had to get a job writing software lol. This was in 2012 after the crash haha.
Eh, it's not as good as engineering or life sciences, but if you have zero morals and are willing to work for defense contractors you can still get some pretty good jobs with it.
i mean thats true but to anyone with morals or ethics or empathy, yeah not many jobs without going for a full phd route
Oh it's not hard at all in the US, if you like optimizing missiles to kill as many toddlers as possible in potential "shock and awe" preschool strikes for Raytheon. Neither is finding a job with a math degree if unethically tampering with people's data and interfering with foreign countries under the NSA is your jam (it's like the biggest employer of mathematicians).
He loved physics yet couldn't figure out the basics of applied velocity, friction and inertia?
Curious!
Can't be sure if he's the same person but my guy is definitely a libertarian. He's a weird traingang libertarian though. He hates cars now and is constantly posting about trains on facebook. I guess he wants privately owned HSR networks which is definitely a thing that would work well :ancap-good:
Physics is a big math problem, but humans aren't. Many physicists, however, believe that because they are dealing with fundamental particles and laws of reality that they are therefore equipped to answer any question on any subject. I've seen physicists publish papers on historical linguistics that are just absolute crap but get a bunch of attention because they have an outrageous claim by a respected academic. One was a claim that they had discovered roots of the original human language (a controversial idea in itself) through a list of cognates across all language families. But it turns out all the words they picked, like sneeze, were just onomatopoeias. The word for sneeze is similar in so many unrelated languages because it's just the sound of a sneeze!
This isn't exactly a problem exclusive to physicists or even STEM in general, really.
There's a german word for this phenomenon - Fachidioten. Translated it'd be Subject-Idiots, closest mediation would probably be "idiot intellectuals".
It describes the phenomenon of someone being very, very good at (a subset of) their particular field, but utterly dogshit at anything else. Of course, the idiot intellectual still has the solution to all of lifes problems.
See: Jordan Peterson, Ben Carson
Okay pet peeve posting but no don't actually.
Assuming we're all in agreement that idiot intellectual is a fitting neologism for this particular phenomenon, the only difference between german and english here is some mediation and whether you put a a space between words.
It's not like this language comes up with brilliant terms constantly, it's just putting two existing words together but without a space.
If I asked anyone to define the term idiot intellectual with no prior knowledgfe, high chance most of them would arrive at some definition similar to the one I put forth. It's just a descriptive term. The only thing that makes it special in german is that we omit the space and thus create a "new" word.
If anything, praise german culture for coming up and spreading the concept that is described allthough don't actually do that either because the word is both used appropiately to describe types such as Jordan Peterson and "those fucking ivory tower libs tryna tell eating meat is bad for the enviroment, forgetting that a single block of tofu requires the entire brazilian rainforest is burned down!!!1!!1!!"
Man I know, I'm the one posting about linguistics! Agglutinative languages are just fun because they have big funny words that would be a phrase or sentence in another language
Listen, I don't care about your "linguinistics" you fucking wop and neither do I care about your "agricultural" language unless we're talking Fendt tractors, aye?
A lot of German words sound angrier in an English-speaking context also. What sounds like a more vicious insult, spitting out "idiot intellectual" or spitting out "Fachidioten"? You can really lean into the (I had to look this term up) the fricative "ch" with the latter.
I’ve seen physicists publish papers on historical linguistics that are just absolute crap
Holy shit yes physicists and mathematicians completely overstepping their boundaries for baby brained cumbersome takes on various irrelevant subjects where a different approach is necessary is a big thing.
The word for sneeze is similar in so many unrelated languages because it’s just the sound of a sneeze!
Lol this is so dumb. "Gee I wonder why so many languages have similar words for moo, there must be something big here".
just wait until you hear about the primeval roots of 'yawn', 'boom', and 'mama'
One was a claim that they had discovered roots of the original human language (a controversial idea in itself) through a list of cognates across all language families.
Laughs in proto-Micronesian
we're lucky enough to not have many people like that in my department (maybe because we're younger or maybe becuase the professors pass shit like this around all the time lol) but when you do get one? completely insufferable.
yeah as a person who studied STEM and hated the environment and went into humanities later, I honestly think the STEM hate is a bit much and has just turned into a debate about aesthetics and nerd hating. Some of the racist shit the liberal arts types say makes Stemlords seem like postracial ideologuesl, not to mention they're often like a level or two wealthier.
Oh I know about humanities too, I have lots of friends there and there are some specific subjects which are basically hell.
As a physicist, I strongly believe that we are living proof that there is no such thing as general intelligence.
Engineers are like physics nerds but so much fucking worse, same haughtiness and shittiness. But they don't even understand whatever science their engineering is based on or physics, lol.
Lol yeah like 95% of all the cranks peddling nonsense theories are engineers because they are very confident and they THINK they understand the physics but they really don't. I've had an engineer professor who was supposed to be hot shit but he didn't really understand torque or conservation of angular momentum. Which are, like, super basic stuff that is very close to what he does. But he thought he did and he was just spouting blatantly wrong nonsense.
I may be a bit biased, but I agree completely. There are way more arrogant STEMlord types in engineering. My impression is that is because there are a larger subset that are just genuinely curious about how the world works in physics. I know several people that started out in philosophy and switched to physics in undergrad because they thought that would be better for understanding the world, but still read more humanities and are really interested in things like ontology. Which seems to blunt a lot of the STEMlord aspects, in my experience.
From my experience in undergrad I could write a lot about why I think physics majors miss the point. It boils down to being learned actually makes it easier to be wrong because you can talk yourself into and defend wrong positions better than a less learned person can defend correct positions. It also has to do with an improper reverence for science. Most programs do not include anything about the philosophy of science, or philosophy in general. If you're a physics student and you just go to class and consume pop science junk, then you're likely to develop a hatred of philosophy. Without that broader understanding of where science fits into one's understanding of the world, all they have is the science. To a hammer, every problem is a nail. Also, on a more personal level, deep insecurity about intelligence.
Most programs do not include anything about the philosophy of science, or philosophy in general.
Yes, that's also an issue. And the philosophy we do learn is minimally connected to the rest of the stuff we learn, really bare bones, kinda bad, and no one gives a shit. There is definitely a big issue with physicists having a really narrow understanding that is not at all holistic.
Also, on a more personal level, deep insecurity about intelligence.
Oof this too...
This! Also, I think a big problem is that physics is very reductionist, which leads to a mindset that accepts a lot of underlying premises and incrementally modify conditions. So when it is applied to something like politics it generates very narrow, technocratic thinking.
This reminds me of a quote from Engels, "Natural scientists believe that they free themselves from philosophy by ignoring it or abusing it. They cannot, however, make any headway without thought . . . Hence they are no less in bondage to philosophy, but unfortunately in most cases to the worst philosophy, and those who abuse philosophy most are slaves to precisely the worst vulgarized relics of the worst philosophies. . . It is only a question whether they want to be dominated by a bad fashionable philosophy or by a form of theoretical thought which rests on acquaintance with the history of thought and its achievements."
It's the modern phenomenon of allowing STEM and Commerce grads to get through college without taking any humanities modules imo. Often for "they won't need it in their work", or "it's a luxury we can't afford" type reasons.
It's unbelievable how it was allowed to happen, or maybe deliberately engineered. There's modern generations of graduates, highly qualified, without an education. Just highly technically trained for their narrow roles.
It is a massive fuck, I know some of these people. High achieving PMCs, just empty of politics or history or literature, and no shame about it. As wilfully ignorant as Qanon types.
The way that education was thought to be the panacea in the past, that's gone.
Can't educate them properly, they'll just become communists, or worse, sexually deviant.
...and yet the elite private schools that produce our rulers still teach Latin, Greek history, the classics. Funny that.
In an ironic twist, engineers and natural scientists in Russia tend to heavily lean left, while humanities scientists are very reactionary (except historians, lol).
Fascinating to think how these patterns and traditions emerge over time. Is there any obvious reasons why it's like that in Russia?
Well, natural sciences were well-funded in USSR, while after 1991 funding was massively reduced, together with deindustrialisation it left engineers and natural scientists very disaffected. The only technical profession that still have significant support for capitalism is programmers, and even among them there are a lot of leftists.
Humanities were basically presented after 1991 as paragons of freedom and democracy and recieved grants for publishing anticommunist propaganda, so it definitely influenced them, also they were pretty anticommunist even before 1991.
Overall, the closer you are to actual production, the more likely you are to be communist.
In my experience thats an incredibly american thing. I've only ever heard of someone who is taking a specific degree having to do classes about something else too in american cartoons and stuff, never seen it irl. Surely usually a person taking a certian degree would only do lectures about that degree's subject, right? On most courses in my country it is possible to take a foriegn language if you want to, but even thats kind of rare.
Sounds a bit complicated, and, more importantly, like you'd have to pay for an extra year. Being well-rounded is great and all, but I don't like the idea of voluntarily paying to drag my dyslexic ass through another round of language classes, or watching more artisticly inclided friends cry over failing compulsory maths classes again like in school, especially if it wont actually help them contribute to their field.
Most people don't do degrees; getting an education to be well rounded and generally knowledgable should be what school is for so that everyone gets it, whereas a degree is a very specific qualification to work in a specific field. While I would like an excuse to take an art class occasionally, I think a shorter, less general degree makes a bit more sense than the american system, but I'm glad it worked out for you comrade!
In my experience thats an incredibly american thing.
Exactly.
I'm not referring to any specific college, am making a broader general point. With respect, there are a lot of colleges you're probably not aware of. Anecdotally, I'm aware of dentist/orthodontist, engineering, and Commerce/Business degree programmes, in various colleges, where students got away without a humanities module. These were internationally well regarded colleges. This was ten years ago, so it's only got worse since then. This is a general trend over the last 30 years.
More shocking to me was learning of schools where at high-school level the subject of History, with even the most basic lib syllabus, has been made entirely optional in favour of website design or whatever. Generations growing up with zero historical context. What's the Berlin wall?
Yeah my university has a large core curriculum with required courses in philosophy and political theory, music, art, and two non western literature/cultural traditions. The engineering students take half of it, but still that's more than some other schools I had friends at, and the courses were pretty rigorous. We were required to read Marx in the political theory class which was cool.
We had Marx in economics but that's only because the major economics professor in my uni is one of the most famous Marxist economists of the country lol
Physicists back then actually weren't like that, they were better educated in philosophy etc.
As one of my favourite naturalists would say about physicists looking down their noses at people who study animal behaviour: “astrophysics - it’s just gas, folks”.
Compartmentalized thinking is a right-wing form of thought according to Adorno, and I think it makes STEM subjects easier, speaking as a stem guy with conservative parents. Deleuze once said that leftism is a matter of perspective and here it means that Einstein's genius explains his leftist tendencies: it is very hard to think the big-picture with so many complex details. For example, physics is different from math in its contingent and arbitrary details: math is about a priori form; physics must understand this a priori form and then has the extra burden of fitting their empirical discoveries into their a priori understanding. Maybe this is stupid and I apologize, but the job of the physicist becomes much easier if they only agree with everything they can absolutely prove, and this is part of compartmentalized thinking. I think analytic philosophy would have this ceiling as well.
Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, etc. don't need weird math symbols to be incredibly obtuse and hard to understand.
Idk, all the physics nerds I knew irl were physics majors and also leftists of sorts.
I definitely also know a lot of people like that, but it's like an extremely mixed bag. Like if you really aggressively mixed the worst people possible and the best people possible in the same bag.
Kinda scared of ending up in some kind of blacklist too tbh, lots of profs know me for... You know, organizing with the people constantly pestering them with sit ins and protests and screaming at them etc. Probably not gonna get the most stellar of recommendations but whatever.
It was literally part of my post that they are the same way in real life, in general. At least more so than the general population.
That's partly why I'm a leftist too, but most of these people I wouldn't really call "nerds", they didn't really give a shit about the school...
Christopher Caudwell is the antithesis to this. Check out “The Crisis in Physics” or listen to Cosmopod’s episode about him.
I’m just a science enthusiast, not a scientist, but I think Caudwell presents a bunch of interesting questions which might even vex specialists. (Off the top of my head, he calls photons “waves of nothing” and claims that nothing in physics makes sense because all motion is relative—there is no point in the universe that is holding still which we could use to measure the movement of objects. I am holding still in relation to my couch but moving really fast in relation to the sun, which means that f=ma depends on context and can vary enormously. If anyone wants to explain why I am wrong here, please do so.)
If you feel like paraphrasing him in those forums and then reporting back on the STEMlord reaction, I’d be interested in seeing it.
If anyone wants to explain why I am wrong here, please do so
What you are explaining probably isn't wrong but it's also not Caudwell's idea, it's basically orthodoxy post-Einstein that there is only relative motion (although acceleration isn't relative interestingly enough but it's kind of a confusing and complex subject). I'm not sure what you mean by "nothing", I'd have to see how it is defined, but since his time there has been development in our understanding of photons and particles in general so he might be working on an antiquated model, but he also may have a point, I'll have to see. What he might be describing is that in quantum mechanics there is little concept of something having a trajectory or being somewhere in most interpretations. So he might be saying that they're not waves localized somewhere and going somewhere else as if they are spreading through a medium, which is a typical understanding of them in QM although QFT complicates things further.
Ah okay, cool. Caudwell I believe calls photons “waves of nothing” because they have no mass and do not appear to move through a medium. When he was writing, I think the luminiferous ether was a little more fresh in physicists’ minds than today.
True, when he was writing there were still a lot of people who preferred the idea of a luminiferous aether and yeah, what you're saying sounds closer to the modern conception of photons.
I'm pretty sure he doesn't believe photons are "waves through nothing" and was using the phrase as a means to explain the mysteriousness that the luminiferous ether had at the time. He eventually reaches the conclusion that as a thing entirely unknowable (the absolute velocity/absolute length being unknowable quantities) it eventually reached the point where we could claim the ether didn't exist. The most antiquated thing I remember in the first chapters was his use of relative mass which I don't believe is used anymore, as we used invarient mass when I took physics in college. When I looked up what the difference was between relative and invariant mass it seems that if we use relativistic mass you must do calculations for and assume both a longitudinal mass and transverse relativistic mass versus using just an invariant mass which would result in a simpler calculation with the same results. I just reached the point where the chapters no longer have titles, but I've been reading the same book haha.
I have a copy, it's pretty interesting. I'd love to see a physicist and philosophy of science person rewrite it/finish it, cleaning up the parts that are no longer true/anachronistic. I'm more of a computer science theory person though. I only took a a few courses, and am in a graduate quantum computing class but am bad at it.
