Hacker News Reader

Comment by searine | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the things I love most about biology is its uncertainty. Things like Math and engineering are all rigid and rules based. Life is wibbily wobbly, lifey-wifey. An enormous soup of changing alleles cast as probabilities over eons all creating endless interactions you can't ever comprehend.

You have to become comfortable with the fact that there is uncertainy and there are parts of it you can't control. So instead you have to be obsessed with introducing order where you can. It is so refreshing to see a beautiful experiment that can wrestle a clear signal from the endless noise.

View on HN

> Things like Math and engineering are all rigid and rules based

Depends where in math, in things like particle physics things get all wibbly wobbly is my cat dead or alive. In things like engineering quite often what you're dealing with is probability based, but you just stack the deck so far in your favor the probability is 1.

As they say, building a bridge that doesn't fall down is easy. Building a bridge that barely doesn't fall down is much harder.

Not saying those fields don't have uncertainty, but I've never seen an physicist pray to Newton that gravity works this time when the ball drops.

I have seen molecular biologists (jokingly) shake the voodoo "molecular biology maracas" over the PCR machine to try and replicate their result.

Every scientist does that at some point. I've easily crossed my fingers and hoped numerous times that code I'd written would work, especially on the first time. Even more rewarding in the superstition when the project is hard, and you're a bit daffy at the end.

It's a human thing.

Surely Feynman made jested comments before running experiments. I'm sure some digging in his wonderful books and letters will find many examples.

A lot of experimental and applied physics operates this way. If you are synthesizing material, for example, it takes a lot of time and effort to get high yields of what you want. Before that your processes can be very probabilistic.

In fact, just finished listening to a talk where a experimentalist was talking about how to get the fabrication yields of superconducting qubits from currently low double digit to 99.99+.

Man, just let me have this.

Biology is messy at a macro level is all I'm saying. I don't need a hundred people butting in saying "butt aschully phsyix and code is also messy and harder at a quantum level." I know. We know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com