:: It's a total contempt for important, workmanlike science that actually advances our understanding of the world but isn't attractive mathematically. ::
I'm from a theoretical math background. I've spent loads of time around departments full of people who feel that contempt, and yet science is still proceeding somehow. That a nominal physicist is showing that contempt is new and amusing to me, but I have faith that someone, somewhere, will be taking up the important, workmanlike, practical advances, because humans tend to be like that. Part of the experience I'm drawing on, mind you, is the way that mathematics has splintered and resplintered because someones felt the need to do something unrespectably practical and workmanlike. So even though physics has been dinking around with string theory for a good long while now, I am confident still that the breakthrough will happen -- it just may not be the physics department that gets credit this go around.
(Well, unless we've gotten to the "chimpanzee" threshold that De Grasse Tyson worries about -- that we've just hit our hard-wired cognitive limit to conceptualize the universe. But if that's the case...)
:: I think you'll probably find the math in the Han book a bit boring and simple... ::
I like boring and simple math. It makes me feel smart. ;-)
Also, one of my interests is how to effectively get math across to lay people, so even if the math itself isn't interesting, I will be interested in how he handles it for a popsci audience.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-01-23 05:39 pm (UTC)I'm from a theoretical math background. I've spent loads of time around departments full of people who feel that contempt, and yet science is still proceeding somehow. That a nominal physicist is showing that contempt is new and amusing to me, but I have faith that someone, somewhere, will be taking up the important, workmanlike, practical advances, because humans tend to be like that. Part of the experience I'm drawing on, mind you, is the way that mathematics has splintered and resplintered because someones felt the need to do something unrespectably practical and workmanlike. So even though physics has been dinking around with string theory for a good long while now, I am confident still that the breakthrough will happen -- it just may not be the physics department that gets credit this go around.
(Well, unless we've gotten to the "chimpanzee" threshold that De Grasse Tyson worries about -- that we've just hit our hard-wired cognitive limit to conceptualize the universe. But if that's the case...)
:: I think you'll probably find the math in the Han book a bit boring and simple... ::
I like boring and simple math. It makes me feel smart. ;-)
Also, one of my interests is how to effectively get math across to lay people, so even if the math itself isn't interesting, I will be interested in how he handles it for a popsci audience.