Comment by j2kun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j2kun | Hacker News Reader

> A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they project literal meanings onto words such as ‘grains’ of space-time or particles ‘popping’ in and out of existence. Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors. My clients read way too much into pictures, measuring every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash. Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant information and what is artistic freedom. But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves. How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes if we never tell them?

Just the other day I went to a talk by a prestigious physicist who, on top of telling only half-truths _at best_, made all of these mistakes and more. And the audience ate it up! As a mathematician and guy-who-writes-about-math-online, it makes me feel very frustrated. I also realized the difference between a physicist and a mathematician: a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the truth for the sake of press, while a mathematician sticks to the truth and as a result nobody cares.

>I also realized the difference between a physicist and a mathematician: a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the truth for the sake of press, while a mathematician sticks to the truth and as a result nobody cares.

1.) This is an over generalization that's insulting to physicists. That physicist you saw was clearly not a good speaker. I've seen mathematicians give poor talks and I've seen plenty of physicists give good talks.

2.) I think you have things backwards. Physicists get a lot of press for their work (CERN has it's own PR department and I'm sure plenty of other national labs do as well). Mathematicians, in comparison, do not get that much press for what they do. As a results, physicists are constantly forced to "compromise their principles and stretch the truth" in order to fit an explanation/justification of their work into a five paragraph news article. Mathematicians do not get the same level of press and public interest and are therefor not under as much (or any) pressure to simplify their results for the media to abuse.

I'll admit that this is a biased opinion but I'm not trying to compare the importance of each subject here. But in my experience I've noticed that the general population is much more interested in modern physics than mathematics.

a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the truth for the sake of press, while a mathematician sticks to the truth and as a result nobody cares.

I think it goes deeper than this. I was in the same undergraduate mathematics and physics classes as Nima Arkani-Hamed[1]. In calculus class, we learned very formal, epsilon-delta calculus (from Spivak's textbook). In physics, we learned from Feynman's Lectures on Physics.

Years later I went to lunch with him, and he mentioned that he spent much of his time fighting the formalist instincts from our Calculus class, and thinking more intuitively about mathematics. I do think physicists play more fast-and-loose with mathematics, e.g. using approximations like a few terms from a Taylor series, or other assumptions. When talking to the public, I can see how that would turn into playing fast-and-loose with the facts in order to "project" their knowledge into the space spanned by laypeople's knowledge, even if that projection loses important aspects of the work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nima_Arkani-Hamed

I think the "fast and loose" goes much deeper than using a few terms of a Taylor series approximation (more like ignoring non-convergence!). Because mathematicians have to go through the same process of shrugging off the formal rigor to think intuitively about mathematics. (Terry Tao wrote at length about this process)

I can understand the desire to appeal to a wide audience, but in this particular talk I couldn't identify a single bit of "projected" knowledge that one could hope to retain from the talk.

> In calculus class, we learned very formal, epsilon-delta calculus (from Spivak's textbook). In physics, we learned from Feynman's Lectures on Physics.

Did you ever consider that this is because your physics instructor new you were taking such a math class and didn't want to waste his time teaching you what someone else was already teaching you? If you spent all your time in physics classes learning rigorous math, you'd never get around to learning what physics is about. You'd have to get your math degree first.

> I also realized the difference between a physicist and a mathematician: a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the truth for the sake of press, while a mathematician sticks to the truth and as a result nobody cares.

Ironic, really. As a mathematician, you should be aware of the problems of making such gross overgeneralisations. Not to mention that one of the most famous sayings about stretching the truth comes from mathematics: "Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

This is about statistics used to try to convince the public of something, not about the mathematics itself

> the difference between a physicist and a mathematician

I don't think I've ever linked to xkcd here before because I assume every HN reader has read every xckd, but this is just screaming for https://xkcd.com/435/

That's an uncharitable characterization, for sure. Though I do remember in my first graduate probability class, the instructor would often say something like "So what do we think the answer should be? Just change the order of integration like so and it falls out. If you're a physicist, you're done! Now we prove it."

This is redolent of eau'd Michio Kaku.

*eau d'

but yeah, absolutely.

I am definitely going to use "the difference between a physicist and a mathematician: a physicist is openly willing to compromise their principles and stretch the truth...."

Well, theoretical physics is not mathematics. (For some reason, that's a point mathematician are apparently unable to understand.) In (theoretical) physics mathematics is a tool, the important thing is the physical interpretation.

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