Kendrick Hang

DC Cookie: Sister Geekfest Part III – The Physicist is total bait for nerds and I totally bit into it.

I’m going to reprise one of my soapbox rants about science and engineering education, coincidentially as I am writing a research paper on software engineering education.

I think “Guy” from the post suffers from the same fate a lot of us do who went through traditional science education. A model is a representation of the real world. Our goal in science is to develop models (Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, evolution, string theory, etc.) that explain the real world as we’ve observed it, as much as possible. The representation however is not the real world — there is always a gap.

Now here’s the catch, sometimes we choose less accurate models which are more simple to help us understand some basic principles. Depending on the context, you might not even need the more accurate model. For example, when we were in middle school, we were taught that electrons orbit around a nucleus in an atom, and the pictures showed electrons orbiting protons and neutrons in circular planet-like orbits. Then we went to high school and found out that those circular orbits are really s and p orbitals that aren’t circular at all. Then we went to college and found out that electrons can go anywhere they damn well please and those s and p orbitals are probability distribution functions that tell us where the electrons are likely to be. So, all of these were models of our understanding, all correct, but in their own contexts. My issue with science education is no one is told that these are models.. so by the time I got to college and I was working on my chemistry problems, I was still thinking about circular orbits in my head and couldn’t shake the picture of them because I was believing that everything I learned in science classes are absolute truth because hey, it’s objective, it’s science!

“Guy” stated things moderately correctly, but I think he was just blending models together that aren’t blendable.

For those who care to know the answer… A neutron (udd, an up quark and two down quarks) removed from the nucleus does decay into a proton (uud), electron, and an antineutrino, but it does not imply that a neutron is composed of these particles. Just suspend common sense in quantum mechanics.

Sometimes you just have to throw intuition out the window. It’s the only way I got through linear algebra (just to name one class). What the heck is an eigenvector in a polynomial space, really?!