Education bubble

One of the world's most ingenious venture capitalists, Peter Thiel, the father of PayPal and the first major Facebook investor, believes that the air from the subprime bubble has already been moved into another, perhaps more long-lived bubble waiting to be burst, the higher education bubble.

Google News, Tech Crunch, Business Insider, CIP, Bee

What do I think? Well, I completely agree. People are wasting way too much money and time with formal education and degrees, especially when it comes to degrees at expensive universities. Both at the global level and the Czech level, the number of college degrees people pursue is unnaturally high.




By the way, if you ask how I took the picture of Peter Thiel, well, I was just walking on a sidewalk near my concrete block and a superfancy Mercedes suddenly stopped nearby and took me to the airport. So I was suddenly walking around a castle in Nice, France, and Richard Lindzen just happened to be taking a picture of Peter Thiel and other famous faces, so I took my copy, too.

How many readers would think that I am just making it up? ;-) I assure you that your humble correspondent is unable to lie.

But back to the main story. There is a certain fraction of people in the society who are actually able to learn certain complicated things at a high enough level. There is also a limited amount of work that the society needs to be done and that require college or higher education. And there is a limited chance that the particular stuff that the people learn will be useful for their future source of income. And there is a rather small difference in the things you may learn at different possible places.

When it comes to all these limitations, it is pretty clear that the people are spending way too much time in colleges. First, too many people are trying to get degrees in various disciplines which inevitably drags the average quality of the members of these communities closer to the bottom of the sea.

Second, there is still a lot of simple work - that doesn't require any PhD and not even lower degrees - that the society needs to be done but there's no one who expects to do such jobs. Third, most of the stuff that the people learn in the colleges is not directly relevant to what they're doing later. And fourth, the advantages of an expensive or famous college or school turn out to be largely inconsequential for the money-producing occupations.

Respect for education has become one of the clichés that a large fraction of the society has adopted but it has been mixed with political correctness. After all, everyone is equal, so if one combines these two insights, it follows that pretty much everyone should struggle to get a college degree if not a PhD. But should she?

It has become almost heretical to ask such a question. However, this question should not only be asked but the likely answer for most people is No. A typical person spends a significant portion of her life with similar activities and those years can't really be regained afterwards because macroscopic processes are irreversible.

Some people such as Lexington of the Economist who disagree with Thiel show graphs that demonstrate a huge correlation between the average income and the level of education.



However, what this argument overlooks is a well-known wisdom that

Correlation is not causation.

If A (higher level of education) is correlated with B (higher expected salary and lower odds of unemployment), it doesn't mean that A is a cause of B. Even if the correlation is such that it is unlikely to have arisen by accident, it doesn't mean that there's any direct causation between A and B.

Naively, you could think that either A caused B or B caused A. However, it's not true. There is a third possible explanation - namely that both A and B were caused by something else, namely C. This largely applies to this case as well - and C is mostly the "innate aptitude" or something similar that existed before the decision to acquire or not to acquire a college degree. The talented people are likely to have a higher income whether or not they get a degree - but they are also more likely to get a degree so these two consequences of their talent will end up being correlated with one another even though there's no direct causation in between them.

But there is one more reason why the graph above doesn't disprove the idea of a higher education bubble. This bonus reason is that the higher education bubble exists on the side of the employers, too. I think that it's not just the consumers - the students who pay tuition - but also the employers who are still overestimating the value of the degrees, even though less so than the payees of the tuition.

Well, an employer surely wants an employee who is good at whatever work he is supposed to do. This requires some talent, eagerness to work hard, and some ability to deal with the co-workers, business partners, and environment, to adapt, learn new things, and so on (I have surely missed some important issues). And those things are largely correlated with the level of education, too.

However, sending a person to a 5-year or 15-year process of higher education is not necessarily the most effective method to figure out whether he is good at something much more specific. Chances are that an employer may find out whether someone is appropriate by much more effective - and much more accurate - methods than by looking at degrees in the applicant's CV.

In the previous paragraphs, I have largely discussed jobs that are a "preparation for life". However, there also exists a more inherent side of education, one that is obviously closer to my heart. John Dewey has said

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

Obviously, knowledge of many things has an immense value by itself, regardless of the economic consequences. You don't expect a string theorist to say anything else - or to have a lower respect to pure knowledge, do you? Nevertheless, I think that even many (or most) high-energy theoretical physicists are doing their job just like people are doing any other job - as a source of income that is convenient enough, without any special emotions.

Fine. So liberal education and teaching of pure science is needed, isn't it?

Except that even in this spiritual realm of education, there should still exist some efficiency in the process of teaching and learning. Even if you forget about the money, it's questionable whether the time - the lives of the people - is being invested properly and efficiently. The most straightforward way to quantify the question whether time is being wasted is to convert time to money according to the "time is money" law and let the people optimize their money again. But even when this is not done, people should try to think rationally whether they're doing the right thing.

A special discussion is required to discuss tuition and the differences in its magnitude at different places. I have been largely educated in the socialist (and post-socialist) system where education was (and still is) free - and the socialist propaganda would emphasize this point about tuition (and personally paid healthcare) in the evil capitalist system whenever it could.

Well, I think that tuition may play a helpful role - and in some contexts, it is literally an investment and the students should pay some money for the investment, at least to cover a big part of the expenses. The school's chance to obtain more money from the excited students (and their parents) is exerting pressure on the school to increase its quality which is good. This is intuitively the case for law schools or management schools that prepare the students to earn some big money.

However, would I recommend someone - who is not a multimillionaire or their son or daughter - to pay tuition around $40,000 a year or higher? Especially if you discuss physics? I wouldn't. I find it crazy. There are many things that I have learned at schools. There are many more things I have learned outside the schools. When all those things are reasonably quantified, I don't think that the schools were as useful as hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In reality, people are paying money for the studies in sciences because they expect long-term employment in the field.

Alternatively, you may divide the tuition to individual lectures and you would get dozens of dollars for every single hour-long lecture. Isn't that too much? I can imagine paying $10 for some good lectures - but every lecture, with a topic defined by someone else and with a very variable quality? I don't think so. People never make this comparison with other ways how the dozens of dollars may be spent. That's why the tuition ceases to be a regulating mechanism pushing the subjects to behave economically or rationally.

Some people don't mind if they're being bored while sitting in a class where most of the information can either be learned much more quickly or should be learned more slowly (and/or in the solitude of the homes), or you don't care about it all (especially because you could learn some of the "details" later if you needed them which is unlikely), is just a waste of time. Of course, the teacher has to be paid but for the student, it's often a lot of work, too. Does he always appreciate the time invested to such things?

Various colleges have totally different flair. Almost no one in the West knows Charles University - but after a decade in the U.S., I am confident that the undergraduate education in Prague is pretty much equivalent to that at Harvard or elsewhere - if not better. The inferior quality of the research environment kicks in at the graduate level.

But at the graduate level, it's still true that e.g. the physics PhD program at Rutgers is not that different from the corresponding program at Harvard even though Harvard is much more famous a school. At the postdoc level and faculty, Harvard is arguably a stronger place - even though it wasn't the case in the mid 1990s when Rutgers and Santa Barbara were the main machines driving the Second Superstring Revolution (before the traditional top schools sucked most of the top brains).

However, does it really matter whether you become a PhD student at one school or another? There's a lot of worshiping of the brands. It's a special feeling to be excited e.g. about the brand of Harvard (much like some teenagers worship Nike or another brand - something I could never understand). I remember my excitement (and songs) in 2001 when I became convinced, after the interview in the Harvard Society of Fellows, that I did well.

But this kind of excitement fanned by some superficial knowledge - while an interesting portion of human emotions - is exactly what is ultimately producing bubbles. In reality, even when it comes e.g. to the income of the professors, the gap between the top schools and the more generic schools is much smaller than the gap in their brands - and gap in the tuition that people are ready to pay. In my opinion, this is irrational as well.

Moreover, the gap between the brands' influence isn't large in many other contexts. This is why I don't think that famous universities may save otherwise falling quality of research. When I learned five years ago that laymen interested in fundamental physics are ready to pay as much attention to a stinky and idiotic computer administrator with 0 contributions to science at a not-stellar-class university as they would pay to the big shots from the world's most famous university, I have learned my lesson. The brands really don't make any difference - and it is primarily the people who waste for expensive tuition who think otherwise.

Sheldon Cooper will confront Brian Greene

On Thursday, April 7th, 2011, CBS will air another, 04x20 episode of The Big Bang Theory. It's called "The Herb Garden Germination." Amy and Sheldon will try to spread rumors and Howard will act to upgrade his relationship with Bernadette.

More importantly, Brian Greene will star as himself.

He will be reading excerpts from his new book, probably The Hidden Reality about the multiverse, while Sheldon Cooper will display another level of his striking overlap with your humble correspondent. Sheldon will be explaining that it is nonsense to try to teach physics to the general population.




Well, I have of course spent lots of time by popularization of science among the broader public - including the Czech translation of The Elegant Universe - and other books I authored etc. But the reality has taught me that Sheldon is right. It is nonsense to teach advanced physics to the broad public.

The public can never appreciate the concepts and inner workings of quantum physics, string theory, or anything else that actually requires a technical mastery of the subject. As a result, the interest of an outsider always converges from the actual physics that makes sense and that has very strict rules to some superficial, and almost universally wrong, issues that are attractive for the laymen because of pre-existing reasons.

In other words, it's throwing pearls to the swines.

Even when a layman manages to parrot some correct insights about science that he or she has learned from a popular book or presentation, it cannot be classified as an actual, lasting knowledge. The first pseudoscientific book or presentation that the very same layman encounters is able to immediately "neutralize" the previously acquired knowledge - because it was not a real knowledge. It was just a temporary state of parroting someone else.

It's actually more likely than not than a non-expert will worship the most incorrect ideas about physics and spit on the most valuable ones. It is kind of inevitable. And I am not talking just about the thousands of brainwashed and aggressive imbeciles who gather on blogs of Fecers Shmoits and read books by Pees Swolins and similar hacks who are much closer to an average chimp than to an average string theorist. They're just a diluted version of the way how pretty much every uninformed layman thinks.

I believe that it may be refreshing to admit that all the interest and excitement about advanced physics concepts displayed from the people who manifestly misunderstand the internal logic of the physical theories is fake. After all, a vast majority of the owners of Hawking's Brief History of Time has never read the book. It is a dishonest game for people to pretend that they are something else than what they are.

In my opinion, it would be healthier if the public stopped influencing things it can't understand and it can't possibly be interested in: the proliferation of postmodern pseudoscientists of the Swolin kind or the global warming alarmists is, to a large extent, a result of the interactions with the extra-scientific portions of the population. Quite universally, these interactions have contaminated science because they bring criteria that have nothing to do with the scientific ones.

I am not saying that the number of people who are educated in physics should be left dropping: quite on the contrary. But what I think should be avoided is the informal promotion of people who don't understand physics as "honorary physicists" just because they display some (usually fake) interest in the discipline and/or because they're found important by someone for totally unscientific reasons.

2011 MIT feminist women's status report

The Daily Beast has pointed out that after a decade, an MIT committee has released a brand new report on the status of women at the technological institute:

A Report on the Status of Women Faculty in the Schools of Science and Engineering at MIT, 2011

The key person behind similar documents at the MIT is Nancy Hopkins, an MIT biologist and the main assassin of Lawrence Summers as the Harvard president. In January 2005, when Lawrence Summers began to explain how his twin daughters played with the daddy truck and the baby truck, she was going to commit the most important achievement of her life.




Nancy Hopkins left the room, called a friend in the Boston Globe, and threatened Harvard University, the American newspapers, and the global Academia that she would vomit if she stayed in the room as a polite participant of a conference whose very purpose was to discuss how women play with the trucks. She demanded Harvard and the U.S. media to start a hysterical witch hunt against all sane men in the system in general and Lawrence Summers in particular and they obeyed.

At that time, I decided to leave the U.S. Academia and President Summers was forced to resign after a year of continuing harassment by the feminists and various groups of their PC friends.

What does the new report say? Well, it celebrates the "progress" i.e. the increased amount of funding and advantages that goes to the women just because they are women. It is inevitable that the main message of the report has to be a positive one. It if were not, the text could also be understood as a criticism of the current MIT president, Susan Hockfield, who is also a female.

However, on pages 13 and 14, they also list "remaining and resulting problems". They quote a few women who are dissatisfied that they were not invited to a conference - and who are also complaining that feminism is not as rampant in some Western European countries as it is in the contemporary U.S. Academia.

More importantly, on page 14, they discuss "perceived preferential treatment of women". What's the problem? Their problem is that they notice that people notice that women are being given advantages because they are women. This fact can be decoded from the lower relative abundance of references to "brilliance" in recommendation letters for female candidates and in the persistent questions of new female faculty: "Was I hired because I am female?"

Well, if you ask me, I can't tell you a universal answer because there's no universal answer. And I can't give you a specific answer for your case because I don't know your name, your achievements, and your talents, and it's very likely that I haven't attended the meeting that was deciding about you. However, I can give you a statistical answer. Approximate yourself by an average MIT woman who has gotten a tenure in recent years. What are the odds that you got it because you are a woman?

This question is easy to be answered. Just look at the percentage of tenured MIT women in the mid 1990s, before the feminist bias became aggressive and substantial. At that time, the percentage of women among new tenured faculty was about 8.5%. It's 17% today. (In all these figures, I only mean the two schools of science and engineering by "MIT" - the institute has three more schools.)

It shouldn't be hard to do the maths. The logic and expectations of the fields - and the relative people's ability to excel in them - hasn't changed much in the two decades so about 8.5% of the tenured faculty would be women if almost no one tried to give women much advantage, just like it was the case in the early 1990s. However, the percentage has doubled.

Chances are therefore 50% that if you are a recently tenured female professor at the MIT, you were tenured because you are female. Try to talk to another MIT female tenured professor: it is more likely than not (75%) that at least one of you got tenured because of her sexual organs. This percentage makes it unreasonable to expect that the discussion between the two of you could have anything to do with the meritocracy. Fortunately, most of you don't care why you were hired.

Note that these effects of feminism are strong and "highly concentrated" if you focus on the female subgroup; they're not as large when you look at the whole MIT because the female professors are still a minority which reduces the impact of all effects that only influence the females.

It's kind of honest that the authors of the report chose the title "remaining and resulting problems" because this problem is clearly a "resulting problem" that is guaranteed to increase with the influence of the feminist ideology, not a "remaining one" that is expected to fade away. The more often the feminist ideology with all its crap about men's and women's being equal in all fields and about men's everlasting discrimination against women influences the hiring process, the greater numbers of inappropriate women will be hired, and the more more often their male and female colleagues will notice that it was the case.

It's that simple.

In the unlimited feminism scenario, the MIT will effectively be composed of the male and female portions. The male portion will resemble the MIT as we have known it; the female portion will be primarily composed of people who don't know much about technology and who use the MIT as a source of free money and a charity paying for daycare centers and kindergartens. Correspondingly, about 1/2 of the money from the donors will go to welfare for the women who marketed themselves as technological scholars.

Most likely, the reality will be somewhere in between the meritocratic MIT we have known decades ago and the MIT from the unlimited feminism scenario. You may think that it's not too bad if 50% of the resources are wasted. But the percentage is only 50% because we haven't discussed the affirmative action for ethnic groups and other groups. In the extreme scenario, about 80% of the resources may be spent just for the affirmative action. Of course, within the remaining 20%, most of the amount is being wasted for other things, too.

Michael Green: math classes are boring

Can and should maths and physics be made much more appealing for schoolkids?

According to the Telegraph, Lucasian professor of mathematics in Cambridge, string theorist Michael Green, has agreed with Barbie (who was silenced by obnoxious feminists in 1992):

Children bored by 'tedious' maths lessons

Well, I am somewhat less certain about the problems he has identified and about the proposed solutions.

Green's idea - shared by many others - is that the math education at schools degenerates into "drudgery" and "boredom" which is why pretty much everyone, especially the girls, want to bid farewall to the exact sciences. Permanently.




Do I agree? Well, I mostly don't. First of all, I surely don't think that the kids should be led to listen to hip-hop instead of working equations because mathematics is simply not hip-hop. (But maybe, they should do both things simultaneously - who knows.) Second of all, I disagree with the notion that the typical groups - such as girls - are more likely to remove maths from their lives because it's "drudgery".



The right kids to learn maths look like Jacob Barnett, a cool 12-year-old student of the Indiana University - Purdue University Indianopolis. Check his talk on back-of-the-house calculations of integrals. Via David Hain

In my life, I've had hundreds of classmates and almost one half of them were girls. Add dozens of people I've been tutoring. Many of them were highly educated - they have learned lots of things. If they had problems with maths, it was exactly because maths could not be turned into "drudgery".

Instead, maths has always required a pupil to independently think, to understand what objects meant in various situations and which of the numerous methods to deal with them is appropriate given some additional information. This situation is very different from many other subjects in which the ultimate "drudgery", namely a mindless memorization of sentences (or pictures or motion), is a nearly universal key to knowledge.

Are kids tortured with unnecessarily boring and/or uselessly abstract things?

It will surely sound as a heresy to many readers but my answer is mostly No. Let me discuss a couple of topics. Children could be tortured by Bourbaki-style nitpicking and uselessly rigorous maths - and by meaningless ideology that a pedagogical Big Cat randomly invented - except I don't think that they are.

In particular, children are taught basics of set theory - sets, intersections, unions, being elements, and examples with sets of numbers. In spite of the criticism that's been raised about those "modern" math disciplines, I actually think that those matters belong to maths and must be taught. Children also have to be taught addition, subtraction, multiplication, division of positive integers, all integers, rational numbers, decimal points, real numbers, distributive law and many other aspects of algebra with addition and multiplication, linear functions, their sets, quadratic functions, quadratic equations, rational functions, geometry, analytical geometry, properties of triangles, squares, lines, solids, polyhedra, spheres, trigonometric functions, and so on, and so on.

I don't claim that the proportion of the material is perfectly chosen but I believe that from a broad perspective, the children are pretty much being taught what they really need for any applications or even formal studies of maths. There could be more diversity and experimentation when it comes to the selection of topics but I believe that the schools that would ultimately teach the kids some valuable things wouldn't differ that much.

Mechanical arithmetics

One type of "drudgery" clearly deserves a special treatment - it's the calculi, large sets of tasks to compute sums or differences or products or ratios of many numbers or complicated numbers and similar things. Not sure about English but we call this discipline "merchant's calculus" in Czech.

Children are sometimes being tortured with this stuff - and I essentially disliked it, too (even though there were situations in which I could be the best guy in this stuff as well - a status I surely tried to avoid later). However, it's exactly the part of maths that a large portion of the schoolkids may succeed to learn. In fact, the non-mathematical types may sometimes get even better than the mathematics-loving kids.

Now, is the "merchant's calculus" the same thing as maths? This is a prevailing opinion among a large fraction of the society - I would even say a majority of the society - or, equivalently, it's the opinion among the people who still haven't a slightest clue what maths or exact sciences are about, what they're capable to do, and what is actually essential to be good at them.

But I am convinced that the kids and folks who are actually forced to study some maths and who may have a problem with it are well aware of the fact that mathematics is not primarily about "merchant's calculus".

Back to Green's theses

He is quoted as saying:

[Green] said teachers failed to present the “glamorous” side of the subjects as classes often descended into “drudgery” and “boredom”.

Now, the presentation of the "glamorous" side of maths has two levels: it's about the personal excitement of the teacher that may be infectious but it is often not; and about the actual ability of the teacher to convince the students that the side of maths or the whole mathematics is actually "glamorous". The second question depends on the belief in the glamor - if one doesn't see it, he doesn't necessarily believes that it exists.

There are obviously negative aspects of the situation - for example, when the teacher either hates or misunderstands maths herself or himself, it's obviously bad and it is likely to produce bad results, too. However, if the teacher sufficiently knows and likes his or her subject, there is still the remaining question whether the curriculum is pushing him or her in a wrong direction.

Well, I think it's usually not. Why? Some results in maths may look "glamorous" but one may only appreciate the glamor after some hard work - or after some "revelation" that often takes place in the solitude. The real challenge is to make the student able and willing to go through some sufficient "drudgery" that is actually necessary to get convinced that an ultimately simple result is correct.

Some results may be guessed - or even proved - much more efficiently than through the most standard, mechanical methods to calculate things in the same class. The more creative and talented student you have, the more likely it is that he or she can apply more elegant methods. Of course that I think that in general, students shouldn't be punished for using creative and diverse yet correct ways to think about a problem.

On the other hand, if the unusual shortcuts can't solve a generic element of a class of problems, while a standardized method can, the students simply have to learn the general method, too. Just think about a random but particular class of problems: sets of linear equations. I don't know how one could avoid the teaching of one of the standardized methods to solve them.

Do children have to stay narrow-minded?

Green also says:

You can't imagine [maths'] beautiful elegance and way of describing the world at that stage. When [pupils] go to school and choose maths, they don't know enough about the subject and the way it developed. Some of them don't want to know.

Is that right? Well, at every stage, one can imagine the elegance of a certain portion of thinking or maths - and the level should be getting increasingly sophisticated with time. I thought that schools should be - and at least partially are - contributing to this expansion of the students' horizons. The history of maths is a largely independent issue but I think that the same thing holds for the history: children should be taught increasingly detailed things about the way how mathematical concepts developed, too.

Did I understand well that Green wanted to strip the schools of this role? That's how the paragraph above looks like.

I never understand why anyone wants to do maths, having been exposed to it before the age of 10; the drudgery they are exposed to. It’s difficult.

Maybe they like it. And maybe even if some of the material may be classified "drudgery", some of the kids still like it more than their classmates - and they're better at it than their classmates. That's how the world works. People are not equal, they will never be equal, and it is completely correct that people do XY if they like XY more than other people do. I mostly don't understand why people volunteer to torture themselves in fitness clubs for hours - but many other people actually do understand it. ;-)

Green mentions that his daughter isn't too interested in maths and he apparently feels uneasy about it. Well, he shouldn't: that's how most girls feel and just because her father is a Lucasian professor doesn't mean that she has to be totally different when it comes to this point.

I see it with maths, and there’s a real problem with physics, to convince [pupils] that science isn’t geeky, especially girls.

Except that mathematical sciences are geeky - and being geeky is sexy, too. I think that Green underestimates the girls' ability to figure out what maths - and math-dominated approach to life, if I can use these big words - really mean. They find out the approximate answer and they decide they don't like the broad content and image of maths.

If someone primarily cares about the "cool" behavior of people, be sure that musicians or actors or similar professions will always beat the scientists according to his or her criteria. I think it's completely logical and inevitable - and the person is judging the world rationally. Scientists are undoubtedly more geeky than non-scientists.

A scientist is someone who is much more likely to differ from a random chap on the street when it comes to his priorities, ways of thinking, moral values, or even behavior. This is just a fact - a fact that has both positive and negative consequences - and the point that the societies should actually try to make is that this difference is very positive because of many reasons. It is important for the progress of our society and its identity - even though mathematics and science is not actively developed by everyone.

The idea that all people in the society will be mathematicians is unrealistic and egalitarianism in math education is downright harmful.

Where did the result or formula come from?

Let me return to one of the topics from the beginning of this text. Many people who are not exactly into maths hate various methods taught in maths because they find them "arbitrarily". If you don't know how a method or formula was derived, there are many apparently conceivable ways to "mutate it". And you may ask: why aren't we taught another mutation?

For example, the largest exceptional simple Lie group is 248-dimensional. Why it's not 1917-dimensional, for example? Some people may view those facts as "unfair". After all, the number 248 got an advantage while 1917 was discriminated against.

Well, of course that if you know some Lie group theory, you will be able to prove that 248 is right while 1917 is wrong. But even in much simpler examples than the dimension of E_8, the required proof is often complicated enough so that it's been decided that the children won't be trained to understand or derive the proof: they're just told what the right number, formula, or method is.

Again, I think that in many cases, it is a legitimate attitude. Most of the children will end up being "at most users" of the formulae, e.g. the formula to solve a quadratic equation, so they don't need to know elegant ways to derive it. The explanation is the same as the logic why people are not taught the architecture of microprocessors or their machine code in their programming classes: those questions are largely separated and they won't need the answers to them.

However, what I find important is to force every single child to go through enough "drudgery of proofs and derivations" to understand the much broader philosophical point, namely that there is usually a damn good and unavoidable reason why the answer is something rather than something else. If the kids think that all of mathematics is about some unsubstantiated harassment of the number 1917 by the evil and oppressive number 248 that was randomly chosen for no good reason, they can't possibly like maths or understand why maths is legitimate in the first place.

My current point is much more general: if there is some hard work that a student can do and that will push his opinions or expectations about a much broader class of questions in the right direction, he or she should be forced to actually do the hard work!

A few paragraphs above, I mentioned a general but widespread myth that the details of the formulae and numbers that appear in mathematics are arbitrary and unfair. This is obviously a devastating myth that prevents its holder to develop any positive relationship to maths. Still, this myth is fully compatible with - and, to some extent, directly produced by - some recent popular degenerated ideologies usually classified as political correctness. And it should be fought against because it's wrong and very influential at the same moment.

There are many comparable but more subtle myths that should be fought against, too. For example, at a slightly higher level of knowledge of maths, there is a widespread perception that "there must exist a straightforward method to find the answer to any question." Well, if there's one, no one has surely found the general recipe how to find the general method for a given problem.

Most likely, such a method doesn't exist. But many people conclude that if there's no mechanical way to derive an answer to a question, such an answer can't be quite right or quite reliable. But of course, it can. In many cases, one may "guess" the right result or formula - and fully prove that it is right. Again, this general lesson should be conveyed to the students.

It's usually being assumed that the kids can never learn "general" lessons - they must always focus on some particular systems and do limited operations with them. It's surely true to some extent; on the other hand, there comes a point at which the child simply has to be able to deduce general lessons and it's important to guarantee that they won't be completely wrong lessons. It shouldn't happen that the kids can't see the forest for the trees.

More abstract notions such as the forests must ultimately be offered to the kids, too. But yes, this "abstract development" should only appear at points when they can already imagine lots of individual examples behind them.

Drudgery in biology, evolution

While I found the composition of the material in maths - and, to a lesser extent, physics - in the basic school and high school curricula acceptable, I may be more critical about the way we teach chemistry, biology, and other subjects.

For example, there's this contentious issue of evolution. When we were 10-13, we learned lots of details about various groups of animals and plants and their anatomy and physiology. I think that there have been too many "trees" in this discussion and the "forest" could have remained invisible. The amount of worthless memorization was equally high in chemistry.

In this context, I actually believe that the evolution-creationism debate is more exciting for the kids - and what they would learn out of this topic is arguably more important for the evolution of an intellectual personality.

In a free society, the children who are destined to prefer creationism will ultimately find and prefer creationism, anyway. That's why I find it silly and counterproductive to try to censor it at school. Of course that I think that the punch line of such classes should be that evolution is right and creationism is wrong; but I see absolutely no reason why the students shouldn't be exposed to the ideas and would-be arguments for creationism because they will eventually be exposed to it, anyway.

A much more general point, one that applies to all subjects, is that the students should have a reasonable idea about the huge proportion of the theories that have been believed to be true but turned out to be false, and fundamentally false. People should be led to understand that many things written in the newspapers etc. may still be wrong; on the other hand, they should also be led to understand that in many contexts, very robust arguments exist that may de facto eliminate all realistic doubts.

Summary

So in my opinion, the teaching should be viewed as a collection of important examples leading the student to learn how to independently and properly think and to get rid of the most hurtful, universal myths about science and logical thinking. Contentious - and therefore appealing - topics shouldn't be avoided. But hard work and mechanistic methods whose importance is sufficiently universal can't be avoided, either.

Of course, separate discussions should be dedicated to "training" for particular tasks in the future and "general education". For obvious reasons, the priorities are different in the two classes.

Students should be encouraged to appreciate the importance of maths and science - despite, or perhaps even because, their being different from the attitudes of a Joe Six-Pack. However, I am afraid that even if the education system were made nearly perfect, some people would end up hating maths - and it wouldn't be too different people from those who hate it today.

And that's the memo.

---

Conrad Wolfram and computers

Conrad Wolfram recently addressed the math teaching questions in a TED talk. He believes that one has to stop teaching calculating - people need to learn maths. An OK slogan. And computers are the messiahs here, he think. Well, maybe. Or not.

Well, I am afraid that there's a lot of computers around us but computers are not yet maths. Half a billion people spend lots of time with Facebook but this activity is not maths. Computers may replace us in some truly mechanical computational activities - I agree with him. However, I think that one can only do "formulating of the problems" etc. well if he actually knows how to calculate things themselves.

He also defends the specialization and fragmentation of knowledge - for an obvious example, people can learn to drive cars without learning the engineering. I agree with that. This specialization and separation of disciplines that used to be inseparable is an inevitable by-product of the expanding human knowledge. On the other hand, I do think that maths is exactly what attempts to overcome this fragmentation! Maths may really be defined as whatever all those branches of science and engineering have in common. It's not a coincidence that "polymath", the word for someone who knows all/many disciplines, is related to "maths" (the root "math" is "learning"). So I don't think that kids are exactly learning maths if they're led to think that it's just a very special tool to solve very isolated subproblems. And I am not sure whether Conrad Wolfram and I mean the same thing by "maths".

CW also fights against the notion that "computers dumb maths down." It's a closely related question to the previous one. While I agree that manual computations and derivations may be equally dull as "pressing of the buttons", I also think that it's important to know what the computers are actually internally doing. I don't claim that kids should spend lots of time e.g. with mechanical calculations; but I do think that they need to be familiar with it.

And I think it's actually exciting to know how computers and programs and operating systems internally work - and we still need many people who understand such issues. In some sense, a big portion of the people who will need maths at all will also need to look "inside". For this reason, the attempt to "cut" maths and reduce it to some "management of computers" is a part of the problem. That's why the interest in maths is decreasing.

As you can see, it becomes strange why your humble correspondent wrote that uncritical comment on that website. Well, frankly speaking, I hadn't listened to the talk carefully when I wrote the comment.

CW even thinks it's "nuts" to use computers to teach kids to do certain mechanical procedures. I surely don't think it's nuts. Even if this "class" were meant to explain what's happening inside a computer program, it's damn important. If I take CW's philosophy to the limit, kids should be taught maths which is equivalent to "if you need to know something, just press some computer buttons." But this teaching is not maths. It's vacuous instead.

The real core of the problem is that every sufficiently understood mode of thinking or procedure may be made automatical and solved by computers. But that doesn't mean that the people have become unnecessary. They have surely not.

CW also says that it's useless to teach "clean maths" because the real-world problems are "messy". I completely disagree with this point. The real-world problems are only hopelessly "messy" as long as the people haven't managed to deconstruct them into clean maths. In fact, (applied) maths skills partially are all about the ability to see the clean mathematical patterns behind the seemingly messy real-world situations. The simple problems such as sets of linear equations are ultimately core components of the answers, even if the questions deal with the "messy" real world.

Conrad Wolfram says that computers haven't dumbed down the education; instead, we have dumbed down the problems. I disagree. It's just utterly logical and correct to teach, for example, sets of linear equations before sets of nonlinear equations. The latter usually can't be solved analytically. But sets of nonlinear equations are just a "minor" generalization of the sets of linear equations and one learns most of the things that "matter" already when he learns the linear case. Moreover, in the real-world practical applications, linearizations and other approximate schemes are damn important and often sufficient to deal with the reality. So it's always more important to learn the "dumbed down" - I would call them "fundamental" - problems.

This point of mine because even more obvious when CW talks about the need for the kids to "feel the maths". There is a potentially infinite set of possible problems and if one plays with them one-by-one, he will only "feel" one of them but he will completely lose the "universalistic" part which is what all maths is about. It's just important to "feel" that there's ultimately a set of linear equations - at least approximately - behind many superficially very different problems. This outcome can't be achieved without teaching sets of linear equations. If people play with the 3D graphs of a function, with a few parameters, they will only learn one function. Still, some functions are more important than others.

Skeptics, TRF stigmatized in a PSU course

The left-wing indoctrination that has overtaken a significant portion of the Western college education is often being discussed but every new example of this phenomenon disappoints us again. It's really bad.

Penn State University is the place that openly harbors the father of the infamous hockey stick graph. And you bet that it's not just one defective researcher who happens to be employed by a random school: the whole atmosphere at that college has been rebuilt to match Michael Mann.

Let me tell you an example. There is a 2-credit course over there, ENGR 408, The Leadership Principles (for engineers). Instructor Richard Schuhmann (Google Scholar: extremely weak!) is teaching it. A group of five students was assigned a task to answer a couple of "fundamental questions" about the global warming controversy.




It seems that they were already told what those "fundamental questions" are. I suppose that Mr Schuhmann himself is the source that believes that these are the "fundamental questions" about the climate change:

1. Is all peer reviewed literature reliable?
2. Is there a scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change?
3. Did climate scientists, including Dr. Mann at Penn State, engage in an unethical “trick” in order to hide an actual global trend in declining temperature as implied by Fox News?
4. Are Senator James Inhofe's “top climate scientists” reliable?
5. How do you feel after completing this assignment?

This opinion that the instructor has invented the questions in this very wording is supported by the arrangement of the

final memorandum (click for the main material linked to by this blog entry)

that those five students submitted as their class paper.

This list of "fundamental questions" on the AGW controversy is quite amazing. The instructor obviously wants the students to answer whether the peer-reviewed literature is reliable and whether there is a consensus, and to make it clear what the "right" answers should be, the following two "fundamental questions" are designed as a request to defend Michael Mann, and to attack Fox News, Senator James Inhofe and the researchers whom he has ever positively noticed (which is pretty much all the skeptics in the world because James Inhofe's office has followed what was happening in all of climate science). The punch line, namely the final or fifth "fundamental question", wants the students to say that they feel good about defending the AGW propaganda and they feel upset about the deniers.

Don't tell me that it's not obvious from the wording of the questions that this is where the students are being pushed. Don't tell me it is not obvious from the questions what the instructor thinks and what he wants the students to think.

This is really bad. Needless to say, the students do exactly what the instructor instructs them to do. In fact, in their struggle to achieve better grades, they add some positive feedbacks, too. There is not a single glimpse of rational reasoning or scholarly work in the class paper; the whole paper is all about the very same ad hominem attacks that you may find in every other cesspool. They essentially answer the first question, whether the peer-reviewed papers are always reliable, by saying "No, they're not reliable because skeptics can sometimes get into them, too." I kid you not. They don't even want to admit the possibility that "reliable" could mean something else than "alarmist'.

I would never ask any students to produce ad hominem attacks as a class paper and I would never reward them for having parroted superficial slogans that are moreover unrelated to the technical content of the scientific discipline. It just seems unthinkable to me - but it seems to be the standard policy at PSU.

Concerning the "consensus", they refer to Naomi Oreskes' crackpot paper - that had claimed that there was not a single paper opposing the AGW propaganda - as a Holy Scripture even though the students provide us with a clear proof that they know very well that the claim in Oreskes' paper is just pure rubbish. They did the search themselves and found papers that unambiguously contradict the AGW orthodoxy. Moreover, they are demonstrably aware of the list of 850 peer-reviewed papers summarized at the Popular Technology website, edited by Andrew and three more editors.

So in this case, the students are just being demonstrably dishonest, and the instructor himself is the very driving force of this unethical behavior.

What do they do with those 850 papers that demonstrably falsify the claim by Oreskes? They just don't like them, so they don't count them. There must surely be something wrong with it, even though they have no idea what it could be and what the evidence for such a claim could be. They behave just like ostriches with their heads in the sand. They pretend that they don't see what they don't want to see. Obviously, they still see it but they don't allow the information from their eyes to propagate to their brains. They behave as complete deniers of reality.

In the section about Michael Mann, the students say that his "trick" was similar to L'Hospital's rule. Quite an unexpected analogy. They don't make the slightest attempt to actually study the science, and they just parrot a couple of totally idiotic, DeSmogBlog-level attacks against Fox News and others. This junk simply shouldn't be allowed in the Academia. Again, being demonstrably aware that Mann has fraudulently hid an inconvenient part of the data, they essentially say that that it was a good thing to do and refer to Real Climate as the apparent source of the authority. Well, Real Climate is not a source of any authority; it is a mouthpiece of a couple of hardcore crooks who are directly linked to this hockey stick scam and the key editors include Michael Mann himself. Regardless of the identity of Real Climate, they should be independently able to figure out that what Michael Mann has done is indefensible.

In the answer to the question in which the students were asked to attack James Inhofe and the scientists whom he has positively cited, your humble correspondent is treated very nicely.

Senator Inhofe has made me comfortable in assuming his choices shall fall in accord with the sentiment of economic superpowers such as ExxonMobil, and not with the science that is repeatable and imminent. Senator Inhofe's reliance on the anecdotes of Dr. Lubos Motl on his own committee's national website (Morano, 2007) are even in fallacy as Dr. Motl's background is only extensive in the study of string theory and hosts his publications on an unedited, free Blogspot account (Motl, 2007)

They specifically link to my short 2007 review of Stephen Schwartz's paper on climate sensitivity. (By the way, Dr Schwartz who had been no "noted skeptic" before 2007 was so surprised by the attacks he faced after his 2007 paper that in his e-mails to me, he looked shaken.) Of course, the class paper also contains some numbers trying to indicate that the Big Oil and other "evil forces" are funding Senator Inhofe. They don't mind that I haven't received a penny from any of those sources - even though they clearly arrange the sentences to create this impression.

The quote above makes it sound as though the global warming skepticism in the U.S. boils down to your humble correspondent and I can't hide that I am personally flattered. On the other hand, I am totally offended that the actual crucial work and papers by many leading climate skeptics whose research is actually important to accurately answer the relevant scientific questions. Instead of trying to learn anything about the science or trying to be at least slightly impartial, the students decided to parrot the cheapest ad hominem epithets that were originally designed as propaganda goods for high school dropouts rather than college students.

Well, they also claim about a "fallacy". There is no fallacy because string theory contains the answers to all important questions about the Universe (thanks to Penny of TBBT for the adjective). This is not just a superficial comment meant to amuse the people. My expertise is clearly not just in string theory but in all of physics in which I was a top 1% student in all schools I have gone through, something that none of the climate alarmists may dream about. My research of other physics questions has been extensive, too, and most of the courses I have ever taught were advanced courses not in string theory. There's no "fallacy" here.

In the final question, when they were asked to say that they feel good about their having attacked the "deniers", the students essentially say that they feel bad that the deniers exist.

This department of PSU, a place that has decided to mass-produce moral screenings, mindless and blinded activists resembling members of Al Qaeda, and would-be scientific hacks, should be closed. The parents of those students should at least try to physically educate their sons and daughters, in an attempt to prevent them from evolving into a full-fledged scum.

I can't imagine how I could deal with those things if I stayed in the U.S. Academia. If I learned about a similar scandal at my school, I would insist that the instructor has to be severely punished for "teaching" in this way, and I have already learned that there are many aggressive apologists for indefensible acts such as this one in the Western Academia. They have to be removed but they can only be removed by the broader society because pretty much a big portion of the university environment is plagued by this problem.

For a much more detailed rebuttal of the class paper, see Andrew of Popular Technology.

Plagiarist is Germany's most popular politician

Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type - at least for the Europeans - and he began to print one copy of the Bible after another.

This year, it turned out that Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the German defense minister, has followed in the footsteps of his namesake. Well, it started with his ancestors. They borrowed Gutenberg's name and copied the "t" in the word "Gutenberg" to become "Guttenbergs". And Karl-Theodor himself copied another person's text and promoted it to one half of his 2007 doctor thesis.



This satirical video in German is embedded to show how Guttenberg likes to be funny about his fraud. You don't have to understand what they're saying; you must only wait a little while to see who Guttenberg actually is - I hope you can guess haha

Because the copied portion of the text was copied word by word, and there were absolutely no doubts that plagiarism has taken place, the university has stripped him of his doctor degree. And how did the German nation react? Guttenberg, the Germany's most popular politician, became even more popular. His approval rate jumped by 5 percent or so - from 68 to 73 percent.

What does it tell us about the contemporary German society and the Western society in general?




Well, first of all, almost everyone is fed up with degrees. I have almost never used mine because I have always understood the external world as telling me that a degree is something I should be ashamed of. This is surely what the uneducated part of the population likes to think and populist politicians have loved to pay lip service to their lack of education.

Moreover, academic degrees have been acquired by all kinds of morons - I could enumerate hundreds of them - and the people who love to use their degrees all the time are often those for whom the degree is near the maximum of what they could achieve, and they may have achieved it by a collection of coincidences and tricks, too.

So at least to some extent, even I share the viewpoint that the degree doesn't tell us much today. However, the degree should be - and arguably used to be, just a reflection of something genuine - expertise, knowledge, ability to produce intellectual assets - that surely make a lot of sense.

Is the society disrespecting those things as well? I am not quite sure what's the right answer but I think that the right answer is closer to Yes than No. It has to be.

Where it can lead? People spend a big portion of their life at schools, and a big part of it are the studies in which they are obtaining academic degrees. Isn't it kind of stupid when those things don't really matter? Shouldn't the public that doesn't give a damn about degrees - and the cheating needed by some to obtain the degrees - abolish those useless schools? I think that the societies are being inconsistent.

Needless to say, this question has an obvious ethical dimension, too. This guy is clearly an amusing teflon Gentleman. But is it ethical to support a convicted plagiarist? There are many questions. At any rate, I feel uneasy about those events.

Homework for Grownups: Everything You Learned At School and Promptly Forgot by E. Foley & B. Coates

Stars: *****

Harper Collins Canada (2010)
Canadian Edition
Nonfiction
432 pages

Summary: Homework for Grown-ups is a brilliantly informative and entertaining book of old-school knowledge for adults. It is the ultimate refresher course on mathematics (remember Pythagoras' theorem? You will!), English grammar and literature (do you know your Margarets?), and chemistry and the sciences (including the big bang theory). It spans geography (can you name the planets in order?), history (what exactly was the Family Compact?), art, Latin, phys. ed. (hockey!), home economics and much more... including, crucially, recess (finally, definitive rules for Red Rover!).

I LOVED school. Well I loved the education part, not the social part. I love learning and I love knowing a little about a lot of things. It bugs me that I've forgotten knowledge I learned in school. I love watching Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? but it makes me mad that I can't remember it all, or at least the subjects I enjoyed. So this is the PERFECT book for me.

In this book, the following subjects are covered: English, Mathematics, Home Economics, History, Science, Religious Education, Geography, Classics, Physical Education and Art (plus a Recess!) For each subject there is a section covering some of the basics you would have learned in school. Important terms, dates or names are in bold. At the end of each section is a quiz (answers are at the back) if you really want to feel like you are in school. I didn't really take the quizzes. I looked over them and answered the ones I could quickly but didn't write anything down, score myself or look up answers.

I really enjoyed reading the subjects I enjoyed and was good at but found myself struggling with the ones I didn't care as much about. I guess I only care about remembering what I learned in school in certain subjects. This is NOT a book you read in one day. It took me a few months to get through this book because I read a bunch of other books as well. For the last few chapters I kept the book in the bathroom as a little knowledge pick me up when I get a break. (If you're a parent you know what I mean!)

Links of Interest: NONE

Other Reviews: NONE YET

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Speed Reviews - Adult Nonfiction

I have a bunch of books that just never got reviewed and I want to start fresh ASAP and review books within a week or two of reading it at the most. So I need to catch up on these reviews. Considering I read these over a year ago, I may not remember enough for a full review anyways.

Confessions of a Bad Mother by Stephanie Calman
Stars: *****

Summary: Do you feel that other mothers are "doing it properly" while you're getting it All Wrong? Do you give your children chicken nuggets for supper, herd them into bed and slump down exhausted for a drink? Do you wish there could just, please, be a little less pressure? If you try your best but frequently feel like a failure, if you - or your children - are in any way imperfect, then join the club: the Bad Mothers Club. Stephanie Calman has broken every rule and done it all "wrong". From giving birth with her pants on to making her kids watch more telly, she has persistently defied all accepted wisdom and professional advice.

This book is funny and a great stress relief read for moms who are worried they aren't good enough. Very humourous and the accompanying website is a great resource: http://www.badmothersclub.co.uk In fact the author has a new book: How (Not) to Murder Your Husband.

However if you are very adamant that how you parent is the ONLY right way, don't read this book.

Buy Confessions of a Bad Mother at amazon.com and support SMS Book Reviews

1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12 by Thomas W. Phelan, Ph.D.
Stars: *****

Summary: With humor, keen insight and proven experience, Dr. Phelan breaks down the task of parenting into three straightforward jobs: Job 1: Controlling Obnoxious Behavior, Job 2: Encouraging Good Behavior, Job 3: Strengthening Your Relationships

I'm not exactly still putting these ideas into practice but they are great ideas. If I wasn't busy reading other parenting books I'd read these one a few times over and fully put it into practice. As with self-help books, most parenting books do no good unless you put them into practice.

The book contains example narrations to show you how to use their advice. There are 1-2-3 Magic books for various topics and they have sold a lot. This book is the Winner of the National Parenting Publication Gold Award and a new, 4th edition has come out since I read this one.

Buy 1-2-3 Magic at amazon.com and support SMS Book Reviews

Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher's First Year by Esme Raji Codell
Stars: ****

Summary: Just as it says, a diary of a teacher's first year. She teaches fifth grade and has all kinds of creative ways to teach. She also includes 25 tips for teachers and teachers-to-be.

I remember liking this book a lot. I wanted to be a teacher at one point and so I've always liked reading teacher memoirs. I love when teachers have creative ideas. If you look at the reviews on amazon, they are quite split between 4-5 stars and 1-2 stars. The ones who disliked the books talk about the author being stuck up, focusing on how awesome she is or being obnoxious but I didn't get that feeling at all.

Buy Educating Esme at amazon.com and support SMS Book Reviews

*All books were received in exchange for a review if I finished them. All opinions are honest and are my own. 

Can the laymen learn advanced physics?

I have actually downloaded 10 and watched 6 iTunes Stanford lectures by

Lenny Susskind on supersymmetry, grand unification, and string theory

After having listened to a big part of the first six lectures - which have been about supersymmetry so far - I can wholeheartedly recommend you to download them if you have an iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch. They seem excellent and relaxed at the same moment.




It's my understanding that Lenny's explanations were addressed to the Stanford Continuing Studies Program which is probably organized for older and retired folks who decided to become students - somewhat older students than the typical students you usually think of. Also, I think that none of them has been trained as a high-energy or theoretical physicist.

The lectures are fresh and interactive. You can hear lots of questions from the audience and I would say that a large majority of them shows that the students didn't have much chance to understand Susskind's explanation which were accessible but still kind of advanced.

Don't get me wrong. There exist situations in which the students actually manage to catch a mistake that Lenny has made. For example, he says that a double Grassmannian integral vanishes because of one factor but it vanishes because of the other; or when Lenny expands exp(iX)exp(iY)exp(-iX)exp(-iY) to show the relationship between commutators at the Lie group and Lie algebra levels, some people in the audience are actually more capable to apply the distributive law than he is, in order to isolate the right coefficient in front of the [X,Y] term which is -1 (arising as -2+1 for the XY terms and -1 for the -YX term) in my normalizations.

But in all these cases, they're either about insights that the math-oriented people have known since their childhood - like the distributive law - or rules that Susskind would have explained just a few minutes earlier.

Otherwise, the bulk of the questions could be classified as evidence that the explanations were pretty much hopeless. There have been many patterns of flawed thinking that I wanted to remember - except that I have forgotten many of them. Some of them mix the particular concepts with totally different - or very remotely related concepts. They can't distinguish the Higgs boson from the vacuum - and many other confusions that may look incredible to a physicist.

There is one extra laymen's pattern of a "fake superior understanding". For example, Lenny has been told by his student that in equations similar to

L|psi> = 0,

he should have written

L|psi> = |0>

instead. Obviously, the correction was completely wrong and showed that the student couldn't have possibly understood the complicated explanations about the supersymmetry because he couldn't have distinguished the vanishing vector on the Hilbert space from the vacuum.

Now, I hope that I don't have to explain you the difference. The zero vector has length equal to zero and if you add it to anything, you get the same anything back. The vector "vacuum" has length equal to one and if you add it to something else, you get a different vector. This text is not supposed to be a catalog correcting all frequent technical mistakes of this kind.

Instead, I want to say something more general. Why would you try to argue that the vector zero should be replaced by the vacuum? Well, my hypothesis is that it's because you have seen the symbol |0> somewhere and you didn't know what it actually meant - at least not at any reliable level. And you have never managed to find it out. So you decided it had to be just a fancy way of writing zero that is appropriate for the vectors in Hilbert spaces.

So you could have thought: the physicists want to look fancy so instead of zero, they write this funny zero in the Dirac bracket. For me to look smarter, I have to write |0> instead 0, too. It is not surprising that such a person will correct Leonard Susskind when he writes just 0: if you want to be our peer, Susskind, you have to learn how to write the fancy |0> as well.

Except that this is not how these vectors work. And much more generally, it is not true that physicists like to write complicated symbols and use convoluted notation just for fun, in order to look smarter. In fact, physicists don't think that other people are smart just because they use an unnecessarily complicated notation or terminology. They try to use as simple notation and terminology as possible so that they can effectively exchange ideas, without a risk of errors, and without the need to rewrite lots of older literature. Physics tries to describe complex and confusing phenomena in a crisp, comprehensible, and unambiguous language.

Many people haven't yet noticed that this is how physicists are thinking. Physicists - at least the good and/or intuitively powerful ones such as Leonard Susskind - are no-nonsense people.

There have been many other questions that were bizarre - well, the same kind of questions you often see on the Internet except that those were simply asked by "Stanford students" of some unusual kind. But otherwise there was no difference. A much broader class of these questions could be described by saying that the students wanted to convince themselves that they understood something except that they had to know very well that they didn't.

Quite generally, to understand what various concepts - such as the Hilbert space and operators acting on it or virtual particles or anything else - mean, you have to play with these tools yourself, ideally in the silence of your home, uninterrupted by others. One can't understand too many things just by hearing them from others. Well, one can parrot others - but parroting others is something very different from the understanding.

Each person's mind is innately designed - and has been shaped by the experience - somewhat differently. So each person also has somewhat different obstacles as well as flawed and inappropriately overgeneralized assumptions that he or she has to overcome in order to understand something. That's why an individual learning or research is almost always necessary for someone to understand some advanced physics.

For some insights, you may want to spend much more time than others in order to understand the thing - or, literally, in order to believe it. But in the case of other insights, you may simply be bored by other people's words because the thing looks obvious to you or you have at least no serious reason to doubt it even if you can't fully prove it. And sometimes you really know what the proof is and you think it doesn't deserve an extra minute of your time. Excessively slow comments about this topic that you hear from others will turn you off.

Topics such as supersymmetry depend on many layers of physics knowledge and there is almost certainly no shortcut that would allow one to understand supersymmetry without understanding the whole relevant subpyramid of knowledge - mechanics, abstract mechanics, quantum mechanics, classical field theory, quantum field theory, Feynman diagrams, group in physics, and other things. And I am talking not only about the full understanding that you need to acquire in order to do serious research.

I am even talking about the level of understanding that is needed for you to appreciate that a whole discipline of science isn't just meaningless hocus pocus (assuming that it's not) - i.e. to believe that the professional physicists that study a certain subdiscipline aren't completely deluded (assuming that they aren't). Even this more modest level of understanding if impossible without having mastered much of the pyramid of knowledge that underlies the particular topic.

To summarize, there probably exist no magic pedagogical methods that would allow one to master a portion of physics up to a certain point much more effectively than others with the same innate aptitude have managed to do. If you decide to speed up a portion of the education, you may pay a big price in the future. Without a sufficient experience and feeling for some questions, you will be permanently confused in the future which will probably slow you down much more brutally than if you learned the simpler material in much more detail. Certain insights and skills get recycles and reused very many times so it's a good idea to be damn sure about them.

All these things are difficult and almost tautologically, most people will always be ignorant about sufficiently advanced portions of science. At the same moment, it is critically important for the health of the society that for every level of science, there exists a certain sufficient number of people who have a clue what is going on. The profile - the dependence of the number of people on the degree of complexity of a scientific issue - is primarily dictated by the distribution of the human IQ and the people's will to dedicate a certain amount of time to certain abstract questions.

However, it's conceivable that the profile could be improved. In other words, people who are responsible for the education may want to think more carefully about the difficulty of the stuff that is being taught to various students - and about the number of students who will be showed the material at a certain degree of complexity - to achieve optimal results.

In particular, I think that general insights that are likely to be reused many times - and those that are likely to play an important role in future neverending polemics - should be given much more exposure at schools. On the other hand, insights that are only used "once" and that you may immediately forget - and that you may quickly re-learn when you need them again - should be suppressed.

International Year of Chemistry and Forests

The United Nations officials have defined the year 2011 as the International Year of Forests and the International Year of Chemistry. This blog entry is my celebration, and the only celebration, of these two bureaucratic events.



Boubín, a protected virgin forest in Šumava, i.e. the Bohemian and Bavarian forest on our border with Germany

Forests and your humble correspondent

Czechia is - and even Czechoslovakia was - a rather small landlocked country so we have a somewhat limited understanding of what "Nature" and "wild life" represent. Forests play an important role in shaping the meaning of the word "nature" in minds such as mine. They are among the environments we imagine when we talk about the world before the civilization era.




34.1% of the Czech territory is covered by forests.

That puts us somewhere in the middle of the list of countries. We surely have many fewer forests than Sweden with 65.9% or Cook Islands with 95.7% but there are many more forests here than in the Netherlands with 11.1% ;-) and many of our forests are much deeper than what the people in countries such as France typically know.

A bulk of the "deep forests" in Czechia are composed of coniferous trees - an artifact of the human activities in the recent centuries. Even in the early 1980s when I was a small schoolkid, we were taught that the propagation of monocultures was a somewhat bad policy that was waiting to be undone because the broad-leaved trees and the diversity they brought were important. But these days, I think that these worries were overdone: coniferous forests are just OK. They're just different.

Czechs often go mushroom hunting. Some nations don't have this tradition - even though they may have very tasty mushrooms in their forests. It's funny to listen to the Americans' excuses why they don't do any mushroom hunting. They would surely be poisoned immediately.

Well, dear Yankees :-), one can learn to pick mushrooms safely enough much like one may learn the multiplication table. One or a few simple criteria is really enough to almost guarantee that a mushroom is edible. ;-)

Years ago, I have spent lots of time in the forests. The Czech and Slovak mountains dominated among the forests; in the U.S., the only noteworthy forests were the redwood forests in Santa Cruz where I spent H1 of 2000. Impressive trees, indeed.

In the Czech Republic, there have been lots of controversies about the bark beetle that likes to exploit the Bohemian Forests - and Bavarian Forest - or "Šumava", as we call the mountains on the Czech-German Southern border (with a tiny portion belonging to Austria). In the recent decade, the beetle became very active once again.

Some environmentalists like to say that it is unacceptably unnatural to fight against this guy. Well, even though I have spent weeks as a teenager by helping the trees in Šumava, I am much closer to the side of the likes of Miloš Zeman, a former nominally social democratic prime minister (who promoted Reaganomics in the Czech economy), who have criticized these environmentalist bigots. The parasites should be fought against (I primarily mean the bark beetles, not the environmentalists).

Don't get me wrong: the bark beetles don't kill the forest. The forest may exist and thrive even when it includes lots of dead trees. But the humans have simply learned how to manage the forest life more efficiently from an economic viewpoint. So lots of dead trees damage the economy of the forests.

Is the primordial form of the forests priceless? Many years ago, I may have answered "Yes" to this question. The humans are changing the world and it's important to keep a "natural museum" showing how the world looked like before we became so powerful. However, these days, I would probably answer "No". The term "virgin forests" is chosen in such a way that it creates the impression that the "cultivation" is irreversible. Once you lose your virginity, you will never become a virgin again.

However, I think that the terminology is misleading because the irreversibility doesn't apply to the forests. In fact, virgin forests are the "high entropy" state of the forest that each forest will natually converge to a few centuries after the eradication of the humans, if I put it this optimistically. ;-)

So I no longer think it is important to try to protect a high percentage of the Earth's surface as covered by virgin forests. Obviously, I find it important that the percentage of the "lungs" on the surface doesn't decrease, at least not dramatically. But whether they're primary or secondary, I don't really care. They may become primary after some time, anyway. In some cases, the difference is of a historical character, not a result of operationally testable differences. It's useful to have a few places that look almost identically as they used to look. But that's it.

At the beginning, I mentioned the Netherlands that only has 11.1% of their territory covered by forests. Of course, it is a highly civilized, densely populated country which makes a lot of difference. I have always been impressed how "totally cultural" their landscape is. Looking at some of the Dutch structures on the land and on the sea from the airplane is simply amazing. Of course, I don't want the Czech forest cover to decrease from 34% to 11% but if the only question were whether the forests should be as "managed" as the Dutch landscape, my answer would probably be that it's just fine to manage it.

Rain forests are a slightly different stories. The nations surrounding these "lungs of the planet" are often very poor. While they may "own" the rain forests in some technical sense, it is important for the civilized countries to realize that this ownership relationship is not "total" because the nations have no real tools to protect "their assets" against others.

So more civilized nations should perhaps guarantee a sensible environment for the poorer nations around the rain forests that will prevent those folks from destroying the rain forest for stupid reasons - or reasons that look stupid from the viewpoint of our priorities and values. If those poor folks would destroy a piece of a forest whose value may be estimated as $100 billion by us, and they will only do it to gain $1 billion, well, we should better try to pay them $1 billion - in cash or in goods - to cancel their plans. ;-)

It's as simple as that.



Chemistry

Chemistry was born as a child of two parents - alchemy and the scientific method.

Among the intelligent people, the mother alchemy died as soon as the child chemistry was born. Before the birth, alchemy didn't know the scientific method: it was a protoscience. Nevertheless, in a chaotic way - driven by people's predetermined "applications" such as their dream to create gold out of any shit and the dream to produce the elixir of longevity - the alchemists have invented many elementary methods that were simply inherited by the daughter.

Chemistry is all about the properties of different materials - solids, gases, liquids, and especially solutions - especially when it comes to their ability to interact with other materials and produce new kinds of materials (and/or energy) as a result.

This is a physics blog so you shouldn't be shocked to hear that chemistry is just a small portion of physics studied in a more mindless and less curious universalist way. ;-) In particular, the whole nontrivial and conceptual essence of chemistry boils down to atomic and molecular physics, pretty much exactly described by the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation, and that's it. In the 1920s, physics has understood chemistry, swallowed it, and since that time, chemistry is just a small autonomous province of the empire of physics.

Chemists aren't called atomic and molecular physicists only because they are much more obsessed with hundreds of examples of chemical processes and their applications rather than their desire to understand why they exist and why they have the observed properties.

I didn't have much access to chemistry when I was a kid. It was interesting to see some wild effects but spectacular effects were never a top real priority of myself so I didn't care much. While I would always get an "A" from chemistry at the elementary school (which included some limited controlled lab experiments) - all my elementary school grades were "A", after all - I received as bad grades as a "D" (4 of 5, to be more accurate) at the high school. This "D" was the worst final grade I have ever received; not even the physical training could compete. :-)

The bad grade was partly due to my personal fights with our very robust teacher. ;-)

A few months later, the Velvet Revolution began in Czechoslovakia. I was one of the high school's top anti-communist dissidents and moreover, the kids were suddenly in charge of the country since the end of 1989. :-) We have voted that we no longer wanted her to be our teacher so the 300-pound lady - note that I didn't call her an 800-pound gorilla - had to go away.

The teacher wanted me to copy a 100-page notebook because of a few things such as a drawing of an apple next to some text about the malic acid (apple acid in Czech). When I refused to do that in front of the class, she psychologically exploded and melted. But of course, there were other things at stake. I hated to memorize dozens of meaningless formulae and isolated facts about various compounds that looked useless to me and didn't help to enrich my understanding of the world, anyway.

A major part of my bad relationships to chemistry was based on my ignorance of quantum mechanics; I didn't really believe that the "explanations" were fundamentally right. I only understood why quantum mechanics worked - and how it worked - when I was 17 years old or so - a year after the fall of communism. So the previous stories about the shells and electron clouds were just unacceptable for me. They didn't fit into my dogmas of that time. Of course, after several mistakes of this magnitude, I became very careful in avoiding all kinds of unsubstantiated dogmas.

Needless to say, once I knew that I was wrong about many things related to quantum mechanics, many of my other teenage attitudes to chemistry may have been classified as deeply flawed, too. Chemistry is an important science. And of course, because its physical pillars are damn solid, as I know today, and because of its numerous experimental tests and applications, one has to take its conclusions seriously. Well, I still think that we were memorizing too much irrelevant technical stuff - isolated insights that are not linked to anything universally important.

This is a comment I would make about most of the things we have ever been learning at school. However, when one notices that the current generation of kids is apparently so much less skillful in learning things at school than we used to be, it makes one wonder whether the "useless stuff" was really so "useless".

You might conjecture that the "anti-quantum zealots" drive me up the wall especially because I recognize that I used to share their current attitudes when I was 16 years or less. But it's not really the case. In the case of the "anti-quantum zealots", I can at least recognize some of their drivers - the deeply felt belief that the inner workings of the world has to be rooted in the classical intuition. I don't know why it takes decades or life for them to understand why quantum mechanics is just right - while I, a relative former classical bigot, still needed just a few months to give up my flawed beliefs.

But it's still true that I encounter lots of stupidity in the world of the kinds that I have never experienced - and these kinds of stupidity are much more stunning for me than some fundamental mistakes that I have done myself. If someone believes e.g. that the world can't possibly have anything to do with mathematics or some exact mathematical formulae, I am simply flabbergasted. Fortunately, those people usually get decoupled from any deeper scientific debate very quickly so no full war with them erupts.

But that was too much stuff about crackpots, psychology, and my personal education history, so let me stop this rant.

Vivat forests and chemistry but screw the United Nations! ;-)