> "And why does everyone think that without Einstein we would somehow enter a 100 year long dark age?"
He said "without Einstein's theories". Physics would probably have progressed about the same, albeit set back by a bit without the man himself, but all those technologies would still have been dependent on someone doing what Einstein did.
"set up only for those who wish to become theoretical physicists, not just ordinary ones"
--- use of 'ordinary' instead of 'experimental' is intentionally condescending, hopefully for sarcastic effect
"very best, those who are fully determined to earn their own Nobel Prize. If you are more modest than that"
--- I'm not sure if this is actual encouragement or a joke. But the following:
"finish those lousy schools first and follow the regular routes provided by educators and specialized -gogues who are so damn carefully chewing all those tiny portions before feeding them to you."
--- Must be a joke. Nobel prizes are not awarded to individuals these days, they go to collaborations. There is no way to get into a collaboration, or likely a PhD program without an undergraduate degree in Physics. Legally not allowed in many European countries to join a PhD program...
"More than rudimentary intelligence is assumed to be present, because ordinary students can master this material only when assisted by patient teachers."
--- if this isn't sarcasm, then this guy is a monstrous prick who just decided to insult the 'rudimentary' intelligence of all Physics undergrads who deigned to actually attend college. Again with the 'ordinary'.
The opening paragraph continues the authors apparent disdain for school in general:
"But what if you are still young, at School, and before being admitted at a University, you have to endure the childish anecdotes that they call science there? What if you are older, and you are not at all looking forward to join those noisy crowds of young students?"
Which is a bit humerus considering the importance he himself places on fundamentals with:
"solid foundations in elementary mathematics and notions of classical (pre-20th century) physics. Don’t think that pre-20th century physics is “irrelevant”"
If it isn't sarcasm, then I have no idea why the author has decided to be so acerbic in his notation. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he doesn't actually mean to insult basically the 99% of physicists who don't show up in "Brilliant Mind"-esque movies.
edit:
From his CV:
* Gymnasium-Beta, Dalton Lyceum, The Hague, 1964
* Physics and Mathematics, University of Utrecht
* Kandidaatsexamen N1, 4 July 1966
* Doctoraal examen Theoretical Physics, 10 October 1969
* Promotie (PhD thesis) on the subject "Renormalization Procedure for Yang-Mills fields", 1 March 1972
i.e. He did basically all this stuff he is brushing off as worthless. As in going to classes, with teachers, at an undergraduate university, before applying for a PhD program.
Well, that is one way to read it, I suppose. Another is to take the second paragraph as the theme of the piece: if you don't have a grounding in all of this stuff, your reckonings and supposings are probably not as brilliant and revolutionary as you think they are.
The author isn't expressing his disdain for school, but the disdain he perceives in the people who keep e-mailing him with the simple answers to deep questions. "Okay," he says (I'm paraphrasing wildly here), "you may be too cool for school, but if you don't have at least a firm understanding of these basics, you won't even be able to understand why you're wrong when you, quite inevitably, veer off into the muddy mire of misunderstanding."
He is most assuredly not denigrating experimental physics, nor is he saying that the ordinary educational process is a waste of time and effort. (This is not meant to encourage autodidacts in any way.) He's even hinted that the "lies to children" -- those models that seemed to work for a very long time in the pre-GR/pre-quantum world -- aren't nearly as useless as people might think they are, nor are the scientific processes that led to those models.
So, yes, he is being quite sarcastic here, but the sarcasm is pointed in a completely different direction.
You are misreading anger where there is slightly ascerbic honesty:
> "set up only for those who wish to become theoretical physicists, not just ordinary ones" -> -- use of 'ordinary' instead of 'experimental' is intentionally condescending, hopefully for sarcastic effect
If you'd finished the sentence, you'd see: "but the very best, those who are fully determined to earn their own Nobel Prize. "
He is constrasting "ordinary" with "the very best". He isn't talking about experimental physics -- that's not his field.
> "finish those lousy schools first and follow the regular routes provided by educators and specialized -gogues who are so damn carefully chewing all those tiny portions before feeding them to you." --- Must be a joke. Nobel prizes are not awarded to individuals these days, they go to collaborations. There is no way to get into a collaboration, or likely a PhD program without an undergraduate degree in Physics. Legally not allowed in many European countries to join a PhD program...
The beauty of theoretical physics (and math) is that you don't need any expensive equipment or overpriced tuition. Just books and people to talk to. Both of these are available free (except some books cost $$$), on the Internet. That's enough to get started.
> "More than rudimentary intelligence is assumed to be present, because ordinary students can master this material only when assisted by patient teachers." --- if this isn't sarcasm, then this guy is a monstrous prick who just decided to insult the 'rudimentary' intelligence of all Physics undergrads who deigned to actually attend college. Again with the 'ordinary'.
It's a simple fact: Smarter folks can get farther without as much guidance from teachers.
> The opening paragraph continues the authors apparent disdain for school in general:
"But what if you are still young, at School, and before being admitted at a University, you have to endure the childish anecdotes that they call science there? What if you are older, and you are not at all looking forward to join those noisy crowds of young students?"
Common K-12 schools in many countries generally teach science and math very poorly. This is not a controversial statement.
Colleges are full of 18-22-yr-olds, many of whom are there to party; not a comfortable environment for some 30+ year olds.
> Which is a bit humerus
You seem to have a bone to pick.
> considering the importance he himself places on fundamentals with:
"solid foundations in elementary mathematics and notions of classical (pre-20th century) physics. Don’t think that pre-20th century physics is “irrelevant”"
What does that have to do with the high school and college learning experience?
>i .e. He did basically all this stuff he is brushing off as worthless. As in going to classes, with teachers, at an undergraduate university, before applying for a PhD program.
The into goes to lengths to explain the sort of person who doesn't fit into school, and would benefit from an autodidactic alternative. For everyone else...there's school. I don't know why you have such a chip against the possibility of thriving outside of college... too much student loans got you sour grapse?
I'm an experimental physicist who did an undergraduate before my PhD and had to fight tooth and nail for my grades and did all that petty nonsense like going to class and after school tutoring and such. I'm not a rockstar, but I'm not a joke either -- I would give myself a "B" rating -- I definitely don't struggle for fellowships, but I'm not Nobel material.
I know from the inside that _these_ actions are the most probable path to success. If some hot shot high school student reads his note, I can see them deciding that they are "brilliant mind" material and then start pursuing this course of action seriously. In my opinion that is a borderline surefire path to failure. College campus is _the_ place to learn physics: you learn physics from casual bar discussions about the fluid dynamics of beer, telling a pretty girl why stars twinkle and planets don't, explaining to stoners why cigarette smoke is blue off the cig and then grey when you exhale, pre-exam pizza binges, adding strobe settings to your dorm lights, and late night campus laser graffiti with your mates and professors. Not from lone wolfing down a textbook with a blackboard.
It's perfectly possible for him to convey his message without "ordinary", "childish", "noisy", "rudimentary", "tiny portions" etc. And if he's just putting together a guidebook for entertaining your interest in Physics, then that's cool. But saying this is the way to get a Nobel is ridiculous... hence my original comment about dripping sarcasm.
Also my original comment was just getting down voted (and someone asked for clarification) so I expounded.
You're right that Professor 't Hooft is being sarcastic but you've got the wrong target.
He's not aiming this at practicing physicists. He says early on that, if you want to be a physicist, you should enroll at a University. He says in the Questions section that you'll eventually need a degree.
This is aimed at people who can't or won't. The sarcasm is intended to appeal to the "well intended but totally useless" amateur physicists that regularly send him crackpot theories. It's a common refrain from such individuals that they are held back by the establishment.
What he's trying to convey is the amount of information that one needs to master to be taken seriously as a theoretical physicist. His intention is both to put off those that have read a popular science book and now know it all as well as encouraging those that are actually serious by giving them some structure to their learning.
I think this really depends on your definition of appealing. Machines are already capable of _mimicking the aspects of songs which are currently popular_. I highly doubt that a machine could, say, invent a new genre of music that had widespread appeal.
The usage of machines in music currently leads to a proliferation of basically glammed out pop rock with pitch perfect voices metronome timed beats and wildly predictable song anatomy. The author mentions that Sinatra's voice has been reconstructed and has released new hits... But isn't 90% of Sinatra's appeal the broken, manly _imperfection_ of his voice?
In short, I hypothesize that machines could adequately "fill the void--" ie. play your running music, play your driving music, give you some background tunes to study or code to. But to anyone that actually pays attention to music it will be wildly subpar. Imagine a machine putting off the same lyrical heat as Kendrick Lamar or Ghostface? How can a machine possibly get on a novel level like that when it's basic coding is necessarily to average the means?
I didn't even notice that it was split into two pages.
I also appreciated that they left out the detail on what the intended purpose for Les 1 and Les 2 was, so they wouldn't confuse anyone with too much information.
I also appreciated the fact that they overrode the browser's default scrolling to a less natural speed, and in doing so, also prevented me from being able to use gestures to return to hacker news.
Yes, I often I judge the journalistic source by the links to other articles. Here, I judge that the source is very interested in the word "dirty". That makes a ham radio article all the more .. unexpected.
Yeah, totally unlike discussions about Monads, or Haskell vs Idris, or the workings of YC, or FRP etc. on HN, which are completely non-esoteric and accessible to the general public...
It's a very interesting project and quite attractive.
However as others mentioned it would be useful to see some sort of scale for the dots, scale for the colors, and specifics on those numbers. For example, I have no idea what "Blue corresponds to levels below the W.H.O. yearly recommendations, light blue is below the W.H.O. daily recommendations etc." means... Does that mean "In one day at a Blue dot you will breathe in a whole year's worth of particulates, while at a light blue dot for one day you will breathe in one day's worth of particulates?"
As it stands, I will stick with aqicn.org for my Chinese pollution forecast simply because it has much more, more specific, information for me -- including intra-city maps. It would be more useful to me if there was perhaps a radio button where I could change between PM2.5 and NO2 for example.
It is very cool to see this on a worldwide scale though. And don't US embassies have public air quality data that you can scrape to fill out things like Africa? Or is that just US embassies in China...?
And why does everyone think that without Einstein we would somehow enter a 100 year long dark age?