@barrettone 521775 wrote:
I have to say that there seems to be this view that science is very hard to understand. And while yes, it’s true, the average person can’t breeze through Landau and Lifshitz’s “Course on Theoretical Physics,” I think people can learn what science has to offer. It’s not meant to be knowledge guarded by sacred High Priests of subatomic particles or anything. It’s just that most students, especially in the west, are not exposed to mathematics or science properly, whereas normally a lot of reading is done. So people might feel they can read Tolstoy but not Einstein or Bohr. The level of difficulty is quite similar, but it’s just that most people haven’t been exposed to the terminology/mathematics. With just some calculus and algebra you can actually work out a lot of cosmological formulae for yourself. It’s where you bring in quantum physics and probability distributions that it all gets quite wacky.
Perhaps that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about when I say it’s hard. I love to learn about it, and I do understand lots of things. I often think of how a person can produce these theories and it’s just mind boggling. If I were to pick up a book and try to make sense of that process they undertook, there would be lots of things I couldn’t make head or tail of. That’s ok though I think. You can have a grasp of the concept and understand how factors fit together without delving too deeply into it.
You’re spot on about kids not being exposed to maths and science properly in this part of the world. When kids are taught just to memorize and regurgitate things, the curiosity gets squeezed right out of them. As a result, we’ve produced a generation who are so dependent on science and technology yet know hardly anything about it. I’m 21 now and I hardly paid much attention in science class when I was in school. In the last year or two I’ve learnt so much more than I did at school, and it’s really dawned on me how amazing it is and how valuable it is to hold that knowlege.
