General Category > General Discussion
How Big is Big?
JVJ (RIP):
I love it when you guys talk like that. It's all pure imagination to my poor brain. The fact that you actually know, Jon, some of the reasons for conjecturing quantum "stuff" - well, that puts you in another universe as far as I'm concerned. I just liked looking at the pretty pictures as they zoomed in and out... Well, perhaps a bit more than that, but not much.
Who was it that said that a physicist was just an atom's way at looking at itself? Niels Bohr? I like observations like that and like the "scale" link. To me it makes what are essentially (to me) foreign subjects accessible.
Peace, Jim (|:{>
ps. Jon, did you get my notice that I posted on GAC of stuff I sent to OtherEric?
narfstar:
Jim I think so much of science or any learning is building. Once you have a knowledge AND UNDERSTANDING of an aspect of a subject the next level "starts" to make sense. If you continue to acquire and cement together that level you prepare for the next. Things that are way over my head are because I never built my foundation that high previously.
This is one of the major problems with our education system. We base going to the next level on age rather than the firm foundation of the present level. Kids are continually having their educational house built on a very unfinished foundation. Then we blame the teachers, who do their best to patch up the holes in the foundation WHILE building the next level instead of solidifying the footer first.
Drusilla lives!:
Jim, I was told once that there were two topics that were always better left unspoken about in public... religion and politics... and now I've finally come to the conclusion that there is a third, science. It's just not worth arguing over.
Yes, all that beauty... and it's just a shame that more people don't just stop and see it all that way... but they won't, they never did.
Yoc:
Good sense there DL.
Or as they said in a famous song long ago - never criticize a mans choice in job or girlfriend.
And in any argument - mothers are always off-limits!
John C:
--- Quote from: narfstar on June 15, 2011, 05:48:51 AM ---This is one of the major problems with our education system. We base going to the next level on age rather than the firm foundation of the present level.
--- End quote ---
On age AND on the even sillier "how hard the number-crunching is," completely ignoring that a qualitative understanding might help the quantitative later (and that math exists to serve the problem-solving, not the other way around).
They're not all winners, but two spots I check daily to get exposure to things I wouldn't ordinarily see, by the way:
http://www.ted.com
The TED Conferences gather the "big thinkers" in just about every field (including comic books, in fact) to give each other talks, basically, and then they post video of the presentations online. They're not all winners, but just recently they posted a guy who built a visible object that shows quantum displacement effects.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/in-our-time/
As you might guess from the URL, "In Our Time" is a BBC Radio show, where Melvyn Bragg drags in a panel to explain the interesting bits of their fields to the listening public. These are even more hit-or-miss, I think, but they have the virtue of never using visuals, so I can listen while making breakfast.
And obviously, both have their propagandist pieces. Bragg's panels are invariably going to play up British contributions where possible, and Al Gore's involvement with TED means a lot of emotionally-alarmist Global Warming talks. But it's hardly the worst way to kill ten minutes to an hour, here and there.
(And then I've been watching "Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends" on Hulu at night, so don't think I've gone all academic...)
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