physics: the most important discipline?

Great Debates
1

I’m in a debating sort of mood, and it seems like the same topics come up over and over, so I’m trying to think of a new one. I have a hunch this might end up being a dud since it probably won’t tap into any really strong feelings, but we’ll see.

I’m going to propose that almost all disciplines are actually physics.

Chemistry is just physics as applied to small things.
Astronomy is just physics as applied to big, far away things.
Materials science is just physics wearing a funny hat.
Geology is just physics as applied to the earth.
Electrical engineering is just physics with an emphasis on electrons.
Psychology is just neurology, and neurology is just physics.
Art is just psychology, which is neurology which is just physics.
Music is just art and acoustics, which is also just physics.
Politics is just psychology.
Biology is just physics inside of living things.
Paleontology is just physics inside of dead things.
Medicine is just biology, which is just physics.
Meteorology is just physics of weather systems.
And so on.

Math seems independent. And logic is just math. Perhaps a few other things are just math as well.

By “just physics”, I don’t mean that physicists would make good psychologists. Just that in principle, if we were smart enough, psychology could be constructed from neurology, which could be constructed from physics. And where it cannot be thusly constructed, it’s probably wrong.

So, umm… there is a debate in here somewhere… are there really any disciplines besides physics and math? Should physics be a required subject for high school students? Can anyone who hasn’t been exposed to physics really understand the world he or she lives in?

–
peas on earth

2

Physics reduces to mathematics.
Mathematics reduces to logic.
Logic reduces to mentation.
Mentation reduces to biology.
Biology reduces to chemistry.
Chemistry reduces to physics.

3

Ha! I like that. :slight_smile:

Although to take a serious whack at it, I’d say that although it is built upon math, and requires math, it doesn’t reduce to math. Given math, you can’t construct physics, I don’t think, in the same sense that you can construct geology or neurology from physics.

–
peas on earth

4

Hey, it has taken me almost two years to work that into a post. I would give my source if I could remember it.

5

Well, I agree. Though it underscores how little physicists have tackled their field properly. Their reductionism has failed to inform most of the other disciplines; I’m trained as a biophysical chemist, but most of what I do now is molecular biology. I won’t say they’re unrelated, but the occassions I’ve had to apply a basic principle of physics to my experimental results are few. The TOOLS I use were built by engineers who relied on physical knowledge, but that’s another matter. There’s a lot of chemistry involved, but it’s the chemistry that is not taught to, or typically understood by, physicists.

The failure of physicists to integrate their laws into usable predictive schemes for very complex systems is a lack that, I feel, is sorely felt in Biology (of course my background leaves me a bit biased - many biologists might disagree), and I’m sure in the other fields you mentioned as well.

6

The reason everything seems to stem from or realte back to Physics is because it does. Back in the day anything that had to do with the study of the PHYSICal world was called PHYSICs. But as particular areas of this study became too large to consider in the whole they branched off on their own. The areas then built on their physics origin to create whole new discipines. So what we have today, what we call Physics, is not the underlying meaning of life. It is in fact the left overs, those areas of study that lack the consequence and relavance to justify their own discipline.

7

In a way, though, isn’t that what the biologists are supposed to do? Seems to me like you might view chemists as a sort of physicist who comes up with higher level heuristics so that people can do useful work without having to always revert to the absolute fundamentals, which would be impractically tedious most of the time.

–
peas on earth

8

Isn’t chemistry mostly just “macro quantum physics”? Seems to me a physics PhD is to chemistry as a math PhD is to a problem left to be worked out by his grad students.

Physicists work on theory and mostly leave the real world applications to the engineers, unless it’s really, really cool (and by corollary, inherently nerdy).

Perhaps the only thing physics can’t explain is spirituality, though I’m sure many of you think it can be boiled down to psychology…

9

Well, sort of. Biologists are supposed to explain life in terms of more fundamental principles. The gap between the most fundamental physics principles and what biologists do is a pretty wide one, but Biologists DO try to reach over to that level from where they are on occasion. Unfortunately, the work really needs to be done at the other end: finding the principles that govern putting the behavior of simple entities together into complex systems (to be fair, physicists are beginning to tackle just such problems). In a sense, I’m referring to the principles that would underlie not only biology but geology, meteorology, oceanography, aspects of engineering, and so on as well. That’s more a job for physicists (or perhaps chemists) than biologists, as it is closer to what they study and train for. If physicists tried to bridge that gap, they would find many hands flung out to them from the other side, but the vector physics has primarily been on for three hundred years is carrying it to ever nicer understanding of simple systems, rather than the integrative approach that would strengthen it as the foundation of all other sciences.

10

My reply was meant to be to bantmof.

11

mrblue92 wrote:

If really, really cool things were inherently nerdy, I would have a much better social life than I do now.

12

Yes, I should rephrase that a bit:

Physicists work on theory and mostly leave the real world applications to the engineers, unless the physicists think it’s really, really cool (and by corollary, inherently nerdy to everyone else).

Better?

13

Physics applied to the earth would be geophysics. In order to construct geology from physics, you’d have to bring in as much field data and assumptions as you would to – hey! – construct physics from math. It’s all math.
<font color=#DCDCDC>did you say “piss on earth?”
rocks</font>

14

I don’t think physics should be a high school requirement. I mean, why should we all be subjected to tedious calculations when most of us will learn the principles of physics just by living our everyday life?

Those that have been in a fender bender, have learned first hand that objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

Anyone who’s shot pool is putting to practical use their knowledge of vectors. Or, in my case, their utter LACK of knowledge.

Toss an apple in the air and you have unknowingly studied the concept of gravity.

Skid bare-kneed onto the carpet, and voila! Ow! Friction.

So, no, I don’t think it should necessarily be a high school requirement. For those who find it fascinating, and who want to apply the principles in theory, go for it. But the rest of us will learn all we need to know about physics the old-fashioned way.

15

Father Mentock is right. (As if that needed saying. :rolleyes :slight_smile:

Wouldnt’ the pseudosciences, like biology, benefit from a greater use of math to quantify their theories? It might mean inventing new fields of math, but if the biologists could explain their problems to mathematicians without all the mystical sounding anthropomorphisms, maybe you could get stuff like natural selection quantified.

16

Cool. UBB parses like Pascal.

17

The hallmarks of any true science are abstraction, models, and prediction. Abstraction allows us to make statements about how all objects fall, not just the one we’re observing. Models allow us to capture an abstraction in a form that can be manipulated, allowing us to predict outcomes. Math is the most abstract, since it exists purely in the mind. Physics is the next level up, it is math applied to model the physical world using abstractions of observations, allowing us to predict the behavior of the world. The further away you get from math the “softer” the science is. Eventually you get to the pseudo-sciences which have no mathematical component at all.

I think a knowledge of physics is useful, but many people seem to have trouble with it, so it would be difficult to make it a required course. For example, at my Alma Mater (University of Montana) physics was the course used to “weed out” the science majors.

As you can probably guess, I love both math and physics.

18

This I’ll disagree with. As a firm believer in the soul of Man, this smacks of determinism - you act a certain way because you were programmed to act a certain way. Removing free choice removes the soul.

Neurolgy can explain what happens with synapses, etc. Taken further, it may be able to explain the results of mental action. It will never be able to describe the INITIATION of the mental action. If I get pissed off at my computer, my mind tells the muscles in my hand to raise my third finger. Neurology can explain what happens between the decision and the flip. It can not explain the decision.

“The large print givith, and the small print taketh away.”
Tom Waites, “Step Right Up”

19

Since it is not possible to rationally prove the existence of either the self or the objective universe, all disciplines reduce to literature. In particular, all discpilines reduce to branches of the literature of fantasy.

Outrageous bonus points to the first poster to name that paraphrase.

The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*

20

I don’t think math is a science. Math is a valid field in its own right. We don’t have to call it a science to give it validity (though many seem to think calling it something else is somehow a slam against math). But the nature of testing ideas for acceptance is fundamentally different in math than in science.
Science, as I understand it, requires acquiescence to an external universe. As Feynman said “It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, you are wrong.”[I’m going by memory so that might be perfectly verbatim].
This is qualitatively different from what mathematicians do. In math, the test of validity is completely internal, completely intellectual. In math, you can’t be perfectly logical and end up wrong; in science you can - it happens all the time. Deferring to the judgement of the universe, THAT is the hallmark of science. I mean, astrologers abstract, model and predict, even if they don’t do it very well or very sensibly. I don’t think astrology is just a bad science, though. It isn’t a science at all! That’s because astrology doesn’t defer to the results of the experimental tests.
This, in fact, is one of the problems with modern theoretical physics, in my opinion. When people criticized Heisenberg for his uncertainty principle on the grounds that it did not define position and momentum very well (in a certain sense we need not go into here), he responded that he didn’t HAVE to define them that well, because the UNIVERSE hadn’t: If there is a measurement that cannot be made, a theory NEED NOT POSTULATE such a quantity. (You may postulate such a quantity, but you don’t HAVE to.) A lot of modern physics explores questions whose results cannot be subject to experiment, at least not at this time. In the spirit of Heisenberg, cannot one ask of the most abstract theoretical physics “Why is it necessary that I incorporate these results into my world view, especially when it is (sometimes) so damn complicated to do so?” They reduce to no more and no less than mathematical exercises. One may treat them as important aspects of the truth, but since they have no present experimental ramifications, one need not consider them important. Interesting, perhaps, even important, sometimes, for what they imply must be true (IF we assume everything worked out previously is the complete story and correct) but IMO, from a scientific point of view, a lot of this is just idle curiosities. Well, Okay, I’m exagerating with that statement. Theoreticians tell us what the implications are of our physical laws. If we find a contradiction, THAT’s very important. But if we find out that black holes evaporate due to quanta tunneling their way free (to put it simplistically), well…That makes sense, and it is compatible with everything else we know (or think we know), but is it the Truth ? Is the prediction alone, elegant as it is, sufficient proof? There are arguments on both sides, but the traditional answer in science would be that it must remain no more than a hypothesis until subjected to experimental evaluation. Physicists hate having this pointed out: Their intellectual capacity to model has exceeded their physical ability to keep up through experiments (not in every area, but in a LOT of the hottest fields of theoretical physics). The implications for their field and their careers should this view - that such untestable work is scientifically questionable - become widespread are, shall we say, problematic. Self interest has led theoreticians to do a full-scale rethinking of what science should be; mathematical consistency is sufficient, they often claim now.

I remain very thoroughly unconvinced by this assertion.

So I submit that a refocus on integrative principles rather than further reduction, which would result in predictions on an experimentally accessible scale, would be a boon to physics as well as the other sciences. Or “pseudosciences” to Lib.