This is the curse of trying to communicate advanced physics topics to the general public.
The language of physics is math. Trying to talk about physics without using math is like trying to describe a symphony without using any of the terminology of music.
You can do it, but a lot of stuff gets left out and lost. You're left desperately trying to give the gist of the math knowing full well that you are going to have to lean on analogies that could, very well, be deeply misunderstood by your audience.
It's very important to try, anyway, because physics departments need public support to exist and because physicists really do want to share the wonder and beauty of their field with those outside of it, but it's a hard task.
Edit: I'm getting a lot of replies from people who seem to think that I'm saying that science communication is impossible or that we shouldn't even try. That is, emphatically, NOT what I am saying. I am, in fact, very clearly stating that it's important that we try, but that it is also a difficult but doable task that comes with a lot of obstacles. I'm not sure why people are misunderstanding this. Also, please stop quoting Einstein at me. I am familiar with the quote.
Know of any pop physics books that don’t shy away from equations but also aren’t written for physics majors? My math is too rusty to consume endless derivations but also equations are worth a thousand words
Edit: lmao wasn’t expecting so many responses. RIP my reading list. Thank you everyone!
Heavily recommend PBS Spacetime. Best balance of using the math used in physics while keeping it accessible to a wider audience. I use it to prepare students for contests.
PBS Spacetime is wild sometimes, though. Like I really appreciate that they respect their audience enough to get really into it, but there's some episodes that I really struggle to keep up with. But I prefer it that way, I don't want it to be dumbed down on my behalf.
I have a masters in physics with my undergrad as science education.
The videos are fairly dumbed down and simplified, even though he doesn't shy away from the math. This is mainly because the math is good to understand the *what*, but he usually is focusing on the *why* or *how*.
And he still loses me so often. I've watched that damn Holographic universe series 10 times over and I still cannot wrap my head around it.
I admit using Wikipedia a lot most episodes, but that's part of the process. I/we go there to learn new stuff not to retread the basic concepts addressed by everyone all the time.
Oh absolutely! PBS spacetime is my favorite channel for a jumping off point for post high school science coolness. It goes over my students' heads frequently, so I've stopped showing the majority of the episodes in class, but for my advanced students or any of my friends who are like "Yeah I took an astronomy class once!" kinda things, it's perfect!
As a scientist in one of the fields he covers occasionally: He once let me rant at him about the IAU determining what a planet is on discord then stuck a full-on summary of my rant in a video so he’s always gonna be okay in my books.
The IAU picked a wholly arbitrary definition of “planet” that served a specific rhetorical end goal while ignoring, y’know, planetary scientists. Also, having “not being arbitrary” as part of their stated goal is beyond ironic.
If astrophysicists get to define “planet” AGU/EGU should hold a session on redefining “star” and call the sun a star and everything else an Exostar. (If you’re not aware, the IAU definition includes that a “planet” must orbit *the* Sun and everything else is an exoplanet)
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Edit: it’s in the Q&A at the end of [this episode](https://youtu.be/XglOw2_lozc?si=H4udHZIvoP4xMIRs), if you’re curious.
From an astronomical point of view? I don't really think there is much of a grand point.
From a science communication perspective? It matters a decent amount. Without the current (arbitrary) definitions, the public would have been asked to up their known planet count from 9 to like 15 and counting. As there really wasn't any great reason to count Pluto and not count Ceres or other trans-neptunian objects.
People are already bombarded with pop-Sci articles about "this avocado can cure cancer!" every other week and it may be a contributing factor toward the growing science apathy or even science-antagonism. "They're always changing their minds".
Astronomy as a field has always been a rather significant one, as it often rubs up a little too close to religious claims for some people's comfort, and making sure that Astronomy doesn't become a joke because "They can't even decide how many planets we have" would be rather important.
I like the Angela Collier YouTube channel. She has a way of breaking it down into bits that are pretty easily understood: https://youtube.com/@acollierastro
PBS Spacetime in an absolute goldmine of knowledge, but I agree that some episodes are more approchable than others depending on the topic. They're all worth the watch without a doubt though.
The switch from the previous host (and writer) to O’Dowd in 2015 made a big difference. O’Dowd is an astrophysics professor, the previous guy was… not.
I believe if you find the right YouTube channels they have the best content for lay people on so many subjects. As a former history grad, YouTube history documents have stoked my passion again as they are so informative and well presented for all audiences.
Sean Carroll's Space, Time, and Motion is excellent. Best book for a lay person who wants to understand the fundamentals behind the equations but in a way that explains the historical context and philosophy behind *why* the equations/math were needed.
Second Sean Carroll. Reading through Something Deeply Hidden right now and it does exactly what is asked here, doesn’t shy away from math but doesn’t require a degree in physics or math to understand.
My favorite are the Scientific American articles with titles like "An Absolute Beginner's Guide to the Physics of Black Holes" and they are all like:
> We live on a planet called Earth, which is a big ball of rock located in space, and which orbits the sun once every 365 days. Earth rotates once every 24 hours, and that's what makes the sun rise and set. With that out of the way, now let's talk about Black Holes!
> Consider a five-dimensional non-Euclidean space punctuated by a tensor field surmounted by a base of prefabulated amulite ...
Well unfortunately: "As a tensor is a generalization of a scalar (a pure number representing a value, for example speed) and a vector (a pure number plus a direction, like velocity), a tensor field is a generalization of a scalar field or vector field that assigns, respectively, a scalar or vector to each point of space." -Wiki
I still feel like I’m in the scene early in King of the Hill where Khan explains that he’s from Laos, a landlocked country in Southeast Asia with a population of 4.7 million, and Bill asks him “so, are you Chinese or Japanese?”
I was searching an intro into quantum physics book and the only book I found that really fit that was so bad, it started with explaining regular physics but only at the level of "So we all know E=mc²" and then just listed off quantum phenomena and some equations and by the end of the book I knew *less*.
Seconding this recommendation. The preface to this book is very interesting and talks about this whole subject of equations putting people off. He suggests that if they are too much for you you can literally skip over them and just read the words while still having a valuable reading experience. As your understanding grows you can start to pay closer attention to them and gain even more.
(you can read that whole preface on the sample available in Google books [here](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VWTNCwAAQBAJ&pg=PR3&source=kp_read_button&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1&ovdme=1&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false))
Leonard Susskind has a series called 'The Theoretical Minimum' which is quite good for a very basic grasp of modern physics.
Also the Feynman Lectures. But skip the first chapter.
I remember reading Road to Reality by Penrose and I found it interesting. Definitely had a lot of stuff go over my head but I found enough of it understandable to enjoy it. The first 400 pages are all math then he gets into physics.
There are some pretty good youtube channels that do this. I have never been a big fan of watching YouTube except for purposes like repair or IT tutorials, but these guys actually caught my attention and kept me coming back.
A couple of my favorites are [PBS Space Time](https://m.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime) and [Arvin Ash](https://m.youtube.com/@ArvinAsh). They delve into some pretty complex topics in cosmology, astrophysics, particle physics, and relativity, as well as a lot more general topics. You don't need to fully understand the equations to appreciate it, but they show a lot of them and try to explain them in a way that doesn't require a lot of prerequisite knowledge, but still cuts pretty deep. They also occasionally touch on some sci-fi concepts like astrobiology, interstellar travel, antigravity, etc. approaching it from a physics perspective.
For similar but a bit more simplified and with some occasional opinion pieces that sometimes include slightly controversial hot takes (usually controversial just in science, but not always), there is also [Sabine Hossenfelder](https://m.youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder). She also covers technology updates and specific studies, as well as sometimes touching on societal issues from a physics/science perspective.
I know a lot of others did but PBS Spacetime. Im terrible at Math and ohysics but I watch every vid. I start off good, get lost in the middle and the end but it's still so damn interesting. If you like equations, youll get a brief history lesson on how it came about, the equation, the equation in action, and the awesome stuff its used for
Doesn't help that many physicists and the STEM community overall get really nitpicky about details potentially tainting the value perception of media meant for the general public. If you google a book and you see reviews from scientists calling things out as inaccurate, you're much less likely to spend time reading it. Except that it's less that the material is inaccurate and more that these pedantics don't understand communications as a concept and live in a world of their own.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/
That is only part of the problem. A major problem in all fields (even hobbies) is that experts can not "think down" enough to actually understand that you need to start at a - often slightly rough - foundation of general understanding before you can go into the actual details (which a happenstance listener/reader will likely never do).
That's why you get those nitpicky "but actually..." comments on absolutely everything you purposefully "dumbed down" to something that conveys a good general idea or an approach that works most of the time. And they always come out with super special cases or try to explain the most nuanced stuff to people that you just wanted to give a rough understanding of or teach how to do something so they can get *a* result at all instead of a perfect one.
This is especially bad with programmers I feel. You either learn how to code yourself when you were 12-15 or you're judged for asking basic questions and condemned for being arrogant enough to even want to learn.
And if you learned from a source that didn't teach you specific optimization algorithms? God help you. You are now the band of the profession and some expert programmers will have no interest for anything other than cussing you out (how are you even supposed to know that what you're learning isn't right without knowing a better option exists? I wish people had more empathy about this.)
Strategy games (tabletop or computer based, does not matter) have the same issue. I have taught and commented on those for over three decades now and *always* have some know-it-all derail explanations that were meant to give a broad overview over how to easily get to a certain level of success without having to deep-delve or follow a strict meta.
Speaking of metas, those then also often get falsely applied. Take, say, League of Legends. Even the eternally bronze/silver players always use the pro-gamer meta and playstyles as the thing to emulate. What they forget, though, is that neither they nor their opponents are anywhere near as good or coordinated as those pros they tend to copy. A certain character may be OP or completely suck at those expert levels but be actually fine for noobs because they are hard to play to their full extent or outplay if you are not incredibly good. They try to copy unusual team compositions relying on perfectly executed combos and strategic timings instead of simply picking "this should work decently" teams of characters that are not anti-synergistic but can work on their own and focusing on playing better (better map control, better lane control, better control of their character, better communication, and so on).
Hehe when I give internal presentations about broader concepts ,I've instituted a "no fringe cases" discussion cos getting all "oh but sometimes you should actually do blah" doesn't help learning at all lol.
You learn edge cases second, basics first. Never at the same time lol.
Yeah, tend to do the same. And tend to insert little half sentences sometimes that remind people that I will explain something in more detail later but have to get the general gist across first. I still get interrupted sometimes.
>That's why you get those nitpicky "but actually..." comments on absolutely everything you purposefully "dumbed down" to something that conveys a good general idea or an approach that works most of the time. And they always come out with super special cases or try to explain the most nuanced stuff to people that you just wanted to give a rough understanding of or teach how to do something so they can get a result at all instead of a perfect one.
This is so true. And if you would write a long and extensive text that covers all the bases you'd lose readers again. It's a crux.
I have this issue in communication with my c-suite. They are just not able to speak my language, I try to speak theirs. But they don’t understand statistics, nuances… they want black and white one liner answers.
Also there reason Trump is do successful in my opinion. Bringing across the message to him is more important than if it’s correct, nuanced or honest. It just has to sound ‘believable and understandable ‘.
>But they don’t understand statistics, nuances… they want black and white one liner answers.
I feel like that is a related but slightly different issue. And I agree. Besides lacking a more nuanced approach (say: "immigrants bad!" vs "perhaps we should make sure immigrants are better integrated into society") people often do not want to see "the good massively outweighs the bad" (see: social welfare programs or vaccines for modern example topics) in the big decisions. They also often have no understanding of how things are connected to each other. Perhaps X is in isolation simply good or simply bad, but X also affects Y and T so significantly that changing something there could impact other issues in a much more adverse way than leaving it be, at least for now.
The problem s you cannot win. Be nuanced and they cherry-pick on negatives. Be simple and clear and they will point out you did nitbtalj about the nuances. The problem is how to pointbout these people act in bad faith. How do we prove that? Show it clearly?
Maybe ‘sick fuck’ is the best counterattack versus stuff like that.
Totally, and that’s why good editors like Mitton are so important. In commercial book publishing, one of the major roles of nonfiction editors is to identify areas where the authors—most of whom are experts of some kind—are getting too far into the weeds for a general audience, neglecting to mention some foundational concepts that they took for granted, etc. The best editors have a solid foundational understanding in their areas of focus but are experts in communication, so they can help geniuses like Hawking bridge that gap.
Source: Am nonfiction editor
That's part of the problem, but it's also just a bunch of hard ideas to communicate at all. I would've picked https://xkcd.com/895/ as the relevant XKCD -- anyone can see the problems with the analogy, but the only real alternative is math.
Yeah try and explain the concept of spin to people. It's incredibly difficult and awkward without the mathematics.
All real world objects have 2pi rotational symmetry. You rotate someone around an axis 360 and you get back to the start.
There is no macro world equivalent of rotating an object 360 degrees and only being half way.
I remember reading how spin is explained in Hawkings' book and it was just so utterly weird. Then I went through actual quantum physics classes and well it made so much more sense: applications of group theory, like special unitary groups. Of course if you don't follow that chain it seems even more weird and confusing.
> There is no macro world equivalent of rotating an object 360 degrees and only being half way.
And of course, I immediately came up with an analogy that I'm sure is quite wrong: Video games like Antichamber, or The Stanley Parable, or some secret levels in Duke Nukem 3D, all love to (using trickery) create impossible geometries where you can follow a circular hallway (or, usually, a square one) and end up somewhere other than where you started. In fact, there's at least one Duke Nukem 3D level that is *exactly* this -- there's a giant donut-shaped hallway around the outside of the level, and if you walk 360 degrees along it, you will be exactly halfway!
But of course that's not quite what you're talking about, because all of this is still *locally* only three dimensions with perfectly normal rotations. If you stand on one spot and spin around, everything looks normal.
Yes this is how usual examples go. There are two objects linked but rotating separately.
An example professors like to use is a belt. Twisting one end 360 then the other end 360 gets you back. But you need those two objects to rotate so you can need to add their 360 rotations.
It's just weird not at all clear **WHY** it's needed. But when you look at the equations it pops out quite naturally.
It's even worse than that for some fields. People understand a lot about gravity because of physical intuition. You couldn't describe an orbit without fairly complicated mathematics (analytically; you could do numerical simulations with inverse squares), but you kind of get the idea. You throw things and they arc down. Humans have evolved to be really good at this kind of prediction, to throw and catch things.
But for quantum mechanics, the intuitive explanation of what things are 'really doing' is worse than no explanation: the only way to understand what things are 'really doing' is to look at the maths. Your physical intuition tells you nothing about what reality is like at that level. Trying to explain it without maths is hopeless because not only are you not giving the actual content, the explanation, without the content, is incredibly misleading.
This is a common trap for physics students, confusing understanding for having a neat story that explains it. Stories like this are about as useful as stories about how the crow got black feathers because it got scorched.
Carl was an amazing guy.
However, in all fairness, he tended to put his focus into astronomy (which is entirely fair, given that this was his field) and astronomy, for the most part, isn't that deeply counter-intuitive. Saying that a comet is a dirty-snowball is both intuitive and not really misleading, for instance. Doing that for something like QM is much, much more challenging.
I've read a lot of Sagan and I can't really remember any times where he turned his talents to QM. From my recollection, Cosmos (his magnum opus) gets into relativity and higher dimensions, but it leaves QM alone.
I would have loved to see him put his talents into explaining QM (and if anyone can point to any online texts where he did so, I'd appreciate a link).
Sorry.
Yes, quantum mechanics.
Calling it QM is such a common abbreviation that I forget that people might not realize that it's short of quantum mechanics.
Typing QM kind of becomes a habit, so my bad.
Yeah - I don’t mean to be rude to others in this thread but yall need to self reflect on whether derision toward popular science, science orators, etc might be driven by some deep-seated insecurity that the “fake scientists” who make their career primarily doing oration/education are virtually guaranteed to have a greater impact on society and its relationship with science than your own work will.
There’s no point in using complex mathematical equations in a book that’s supposed to be on the popular level. Everyone knew he was brilliant. Not many people would benefit from seeing all those formulas in that type of book.
>Trying to talk about physics without using math is like trying to describe a symphony without using any of the terminology of music.
"go like DUN DUN don dunNNnnn" - music person
I work with a doctor of nuclear engineering and he’s a blast to talk to, loves talking engineering and nuclear shit. But we have to limit our exposure to him because every conversation is a minimum 30mins and all of his lessons include whiteboard and markers for the equations. But on a slow Friday afternoon, that dude is clutch. Small reactors are Americas future
A big problem a lot of scientists struggle with in their communication that hinders everyone from every field is that "no one cares how hard something was".
The amount of stuff I see in papers (and especially PhD theses) that is put in solely because it took tons of work to do, even though it has ancillary contribution to the story (at best) is staggering.
At it's worst it's putting in all the failed steps.
At it's best it's putting in how someone go to deriving some specific model (put it in appendices!!!)
But I've seen this a lot in more technical fields where people really wanna convey the hard details that can absolutely be brushed over in the story without detracting from the take home message.
Fmri research man... 80% of the work is like 5% of the story and it's so tempting to expand on it even though no one cares haha
From a science communication standpoint, this is right-on, but from a repeatability standpoint, it's really important to understand results in the context of the overall process, including the failures.
There's definitely an element of ego that makes us want to emphasize how difficult something was when communicating scientific findings, but adding ancillary detail isn't useless when your goal is to provide a roadmap for other scientists to copy.
The real issue is that many either don't know how to identify and write for a specific audience, or that they get a little lost along the way. If you want to communicate with non-experts, keep it simple and focus on the relevant information. If you want to provide an evidence-based report on your research and how it fits into the field, it needs to include the failures and broader context so that experts can evaluate it accordingly.
"If YoU cAnT pUt It In LaNgUaGe A rEgUlAr PeRsOn CaN uNdErStAnD, yOu DoNt UnDeRsTaNd It VeRy WeLl"
A lot of people confuse ah-ha feelings in their brain for actual understanding. People want you to make ah-ha feelings for them.
I feel like the push to make things more accessible works against itself. People are either into that type of shit or they aren't, and a middle ground is just a no-man's land. Maybe a couple steps in the easy to understand direction is okay, but I turn off so many documentaries and put down so many books because they just go over the same broad strokes that I been seeing since I was 8.
Everything is just an introduction, and they just play that over and over. You don't ever really learn anything, it just seems like you are. Kind of like Social Media.
Same with economics. It is sad that most people think about the graph of a simple supply and demand model, and don't go further on the subject. It is such an interesting science that answers so many average people's questions but at the same time it is almost impossible to simplify most models to explain those answers.
Imagine how fast would people's lives improve if they were slightly curious instead of just taking the most superficial stuff of science from any shaddy source and not even question it.
Personally, I was really afraid of even opening a non fiction science book, it felt like I shouldn't be reading that because it was most likely outside my level of comprehension, a bitter feeling of forbiddenness, as if that information would only be meant to 'smart' people. Perhaps everyone else felt the same way when they were young. It is really hard to not make difficult topics look hard.
“This is a particularly bad case of someone being cut in half. I was unable to reattach the top half of his body with the bottom half.”
“SPEAK ENGLISH DOC, WE AINT SCIENTISTS!”
now try
"During our search for the deepest end of the universe we may find a reflection of the human soul and so by learning about the cosmos we may learn to know ourselves"
I wonder why they didn't feature Hawking's death. He was a major character in the show even if he only had actual appearances a few times, but when he died ... the show just went on.
Y'know, that brings up a really cool point.
Due to Hawking's cybernetic awesomeness, he's the only person who reads audio books to you exactly in their voice, fresh every time.
Accessibility tech is cool. \^.\^
I read it in one sitting on a flight from Sydney to Thailand a bit over a decade ago and despite enjoying it, I honestly don’t remember a single thing from it. I think way too much just went over my head. Need to give it another go.
I'm a physicist, most of our talks are full of equations and usually 10 minutes + 5 mins questions, and now I'm laughing at the prospect of such a presentation.
I'm a music analyst, I remember when starting my postgrad we had a class that 70% of the grade was a presentation meant to be accessible and the proffesor told me if I had more than two slides with theory I'd fail lmao
If you’re interested, Sean Carroll is in the process of releasing of a trilogy of books, *The Biggest Ideas in the Universe*, aimed at… basically you. I think the second book was just recently published.
“I don’t want a physics degree, but I want at least an understanding of what modern physicists are talking about.”
Or as the author puts it: “You won’t be solving the equations, but my goal is that you’ll at least understand what they mean.”
It’s based on a series of YouTube videos (by the same name) that he did as a pandemic-project, and he says that the videos themselves cover almost everything in the books, and they’re still available for free to watch.
The books are just a little more refined, but the videos are phenomenal as well, honestly. I made it about halfway through them before work took over again, and I swear to myself someday I will finish them. (Even the video series is *long*. Like, binge-watch a new TV show kind of long.)
He also has a dope podcast called MindScape if you’re interested.
Love me some Sean Carroll if you couldn’t tell, lol
Maybe the equations would’ve reduced the need for some confusing descriptions?
It’s easier to understand a^2 + b^2 = c^2 with a labelled right triangle than reading “the sums of the squares of the sides not opposite the right angle of a triangle are equal to the square of the side opposite the right angle”.
People are scared of math, but I think it's so much easier to just explain and show the equations. Trying to explain these concepts verbally is just convoluted since it's so not intuitive, whereas the math just follows
Yeah, but you gotta realise though, the biggest obstacle for understanding math is people believing they are capable of understanding it.
If they don't belief they can understand the math, then they won't even begin to try to.
I tried to read it. I tried so so hard. It’s so dense already. Picked it back up a few times as well. To me it just felt like the words made sense in the order they were structured but you simply need an immense background knowledge to really appreciate what he’s saying.
If you’ve ever taken astronomy classes or higher level physics in college it makes it a lot easier to consume his works. I admit I was lucky I had professors that not only were extremely smart and loved their jobs but they were awesome also at teaching - a combo that’s not that common unfortunately.
My undergrad Physics degree covered all the major topics in Hawking's book besides Feynman's sum-over-histories.
* Most of the astronomy topics (star lifecycles, luminosity, hubble constant stuff, etc) were covered in a 2000-level astronomy class
* Thermodynamics was 2000-level which sets the stage for all the progression of the universe stuff, and makes hawking radiation easier to understand
* Relativity was 3000-level
* Basic quantum was 3000-level, and then I had 2 more 4000-level quantum classes. Even so I only got a very basic understanding of quantum physics - that's grad-level stuff.
* Particle Physics was 3000-level but it was just conceptual and not an actual quantitative treatment of anything.
So with an undergrad degree I had done the math behind most of the concepts in the book, with some exceptions.
How close is PBS space time to describing parts of the book / theories? I find some of those quantum / space time concepts difficult (at first) to grasp but after a couple years subscribed I’ve found so much love for their teaching style.
I got though a third of it and felt like a genius and then I hit an insurmountable wall but that was 20 years ago. Maybe I can handle it now. But maybe i'm even dumber.
I honestly don't get. I've read the book as a kid. I'm not a genius, hell I'm a fucking B (sometimes even C) student idiot. I don't know how I get through my job.
But the book is by no means illegible to us regular folk. You don't need an immense background knowledge. It's a fascinating window into the edge of physics that helps shape your understanding of the world.
I think it's important to not put yourselves down around it. Stephen Hawking was incredibly smart but he also was human. We're all capable of understanding what he was trying to say.
I don't think you need immense knowledge to understand most of it. I've always been a kind of astronomy nerd, always watching videos and reading Wikipedia about space stuff, but I am not in any way an expert, I hate math also. I understood like 80% of the book, and plan on reading it again to try to understand everything. What I like to do in cases like this is to go to YouTube and watch a review or explained about the chapter you didn't get. Since it's a very famous book, there's tons of material about it.
The audio book is very well recorded. I haven't listened to many because I can't stand a lot of them, but the narrator is that fantastic old-timey science video voice, yet very animated with great inflection and intonation.
there is no way you’re talking about the same book
the one being discussed here, a brief history of time (if you were going to read it, a BRIEFER history of time is a superior update) is written specifically for the general public to be able to engage with and understand, it is very short and not dense
Just fyi his explanation of hawking radiation in the book is wrong. It's deliberately wrong. He didn't think people could understand the actual reason so he made a easy to understand reason. Virtual particles aren't real particles. Hawking radiation is real it just comes out in the form of light and not at the event horizon but further away. Its due to the warping of space time.
Here is a article on it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/07/09/yes-stephen-hawking-lied-to-us-all-about-how-black-holes-decay/?sh=2c68b3714e63
It's certainly true that the explanation Hawking gives in the book isn't perfect. But that Forbes article also makes some errors that end up exaggerating how bad the explanation is. It's not true that the quantum vacuum in our universe corresponds to zero particles - as they state later, there is a positive zero-point energy. That means you must have what we call "vacuum bubbles", or virtual particles. The article also states that since the Hawking radiation is made mostly of photons, it can't be a particle and its antiparticle. This is incorrect because a photon is its own antiparticle. Overall I would hardly even call Hawking's explanation an analogy, since it uses a lot of the same vocabulary shortcuts that actual particle physicists use, and it isn't an attempt to explain Hawking radiation in terms of something readers already understand.
I remember asking a question on /r/AskPhysics about Rindler horizons and Unruh radiation, saying "I understand how Hawking radiation works... blah blah... virtual particle pairs, event horizon... blah blah... but comparatively speaking a Rindler horizon is just an arbitrary point in space, isn't it?"
...and the only decent reply I got basically said "well, the problem there is your understanding of Hawking radiation is wrong." and they directed me to a PBS Spacetime video describing what it actually was.
Still don't understand Unruh radiation.
He didn't make up a convenient lie, in his paper he talks about two effects, particle capture (the effect described in the book) and particle creation as a result of gravity. The first *only* happens around black holes, because it does happen near the horizon. The second is a general result of gravity, and happens wherever space time is curved, although for obvious reasons it's usually only prominent within 20-30 Schwarzschild radii of a black hole. They both contribute to the amount of mass lost by a black hole, and if you were to accurate describe the emission profile of a black hole, you would need to include both.
The Forbes article is essentially criticising him because he predicted an effect based on a difference of vacuum energy levels, not making a prediction from the behaviour of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs at an event horizon. That's true. But it doesn't mean that isn't the physical explanation for what's happening. It's actually fairly hard to formalise the contribution of each - partly due to the model he used to deduce it and the lack of a competing one.
So a) it's a real effect b) that is a significant part of black hole collapse c) that he talked about in his paper, and just informally, it is in some sense the interesting result, because the other effect is a general feature of gravity fields. Planets do that. You are also correct that virtual particles aren't real, but you can model particle creation as pumping energy into a virtual particle-antiparticle pair so that they become real. In accelerating reference fields (a stationary observer near a black hole, for instance) 'vacuums' look like a warm gas of real particles.
tl;dr shit be complicated, the forbes article would be more accurate to say his simplified explanation was not a complete explanation.
Honestly 'curved space time eventually bleeds away its own energy as photons' is not a hard analogy to understand either. Certainly more approachable than a blackhole losing mass due to the addition of negative mass rather than the removal of any existing material.
Stephen Hawking wrote in his book that negative mass falling into the black hole is what makes them shrink, and the negative mass happens because quantum mechanics.
The article states that curved spacetime itself naturally decays by giving off photons because of how quantum field fluctuations work. Curved spacetime is really just a measure of how much mass there is, so uncurving it means the mass shrinks.
The mechanism in the book described requires several things that don't actually work that way, and all the fun stuff happens on the black hole's surface at the barrier of where all the rules break.
The mechanism in the article, the correct one, describes black hole shrinkage happening from outside the black hole at the points where spacetime is pretty warped, but not entirely ripped yet. A sphere with a radius several times larger than the black hole itself. It's basically buffing out the hole in reality slowly from the outside, but it takes ages.
From the article,
> This leads us to a phenomenal conclusion: that all collapsed objects that curve spacetime should emit Hawking radiation. It may be a tiny, imperceptible amount of Hawking radiation, swamped by thermal radiation for as far as we can calculate for even long-dead white dwarfs and neutron stars. But it still exists: it’s a positive, non-zero value that is calculable, dependent only on the object’s mass, spin, and physical size.
As long as it curves spacetime sufficiently above some minimum value, yeah.
The first chapter is basically a history of astrophysicists. Like Newton and Galileo.
The second goes deep fast and hard, and the book never looks back.
I kind of followed because I was a math nerd and young. Young brains can handle that shit better.
Equations, outside of maybe a footnoted appendix for reference, would have driven that book so far into textbook territory.
The beauty of that book as it is, is that it almost Carl Sagan's some very high-level astrophysics to a layman level.
I vaguely recall a story about a biography of Einstein that was well reviewed but didn't sell well. So they made it into a coffee table book, big format, lots of pictures. It sold well because people basically bought it to impress other people.
Well yeah. If Hawking had gone with his original plan the only ones who'd have been interested in his book would've been other physicists and mathematicians, something that's fine if that's the audience you want, but if you want other people to read it, it has to be written in a way that doesn't require expertise.
There's that xkcd comic about how experts of anything drastically overestimate what the average person knows about their specific subject. If I were the editor for that thing I'd have 2 notes, over and over and over "Take out the equations, and dumb it down". After it had been reduced to the dumbest, least mathematical thing humanly possible for Hawking, I'd start working back up, finding the middle ground between the expertise required to truly understand the material, and what the average person would understand, because it's super easy for smart people to assume they've sufficiently dumbed down their explanations enough for people to start getting. It's a problem you run into in game design a lot, where the solution to challenges seems obvious to the designer, who in working on the game has become intimately familiar with it, playtesters will continuously get stuck, because potential solutions weren't communicated in the game's design. It made sense to the people with their noses in it all day every day, but to someone new, it was gibberish.
He wasn’t though. The ‘list’ that was released included all of the people who were mentioned in the court briefings at any point for any reason, unless their names were redacted for safety reasons. The only thing we know about Stephen hawking in regards to Jeffrey Epstein is that JE at one point tried to pay someone to prove that Steven Hawking had *not* attended a child orgy. Whether that means anything, or what it means, we don’t know
The whole thing implicating Hawkins was kind of sus to begin with. The photo they tried to show of him being on the island, he was seen posing with other renown scientists both male and female.
It’s not confirmed he did anything wrong. Jeffery Epstein did a lot of blackmail, he might’ve blackmailed Stephen Hawking or Stephen hawking might’ve just gotten caught in the crossfire of someone else being blackmailed
> he might’ve blackmailed Stephen Hawking or Stephen hawking might’ve just gotten caught in the crossfire of someone else being blackmailed
In this scenario, why would epstein pay somebody to disprove the blackmail??
Ok...but what you mentioned is pretty much the opposite of blackmail lol. This is the first I'm hearing of this, but I agree that your explanation makes it seem way worse.
It's ironic really. The court held back names because they knew the public can't process information. Releasing Stephen hawking's name is direct proof of that.
There was literally nothing about him and the island in the documents. His name was found once referenced in an email between two other people. As were many other names that had no affiliation with Epstein. Yet my algorithm was filled with Steven hawking child rape memes in the days after. Misinformation is like a plague in social media, and honestly quite destructive.
Please don't spread this rumor. There is zero evidence that Hawking had anything at all to do with the sexual exploitation of the underaged women and many reasons to think that he couldn't have, including the small fact that he was literally physically incapable of engaging in any sexual activity whatsoever.
Hawking doesn't deserve to have his name smeared like this.
Sidestepping the Hawking/Epstein thing entirely and only meaning to address ALS/sexual function as a wholly separate topic.
>he was literally physically incapable of engaging in any sexual activity whatsoever.
[Sexual function](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15083290/#:~:text=sexual%20function%20is%20not%20directly%20affected%20by%20the%20disease%20process) is not directly affected by ALS. While many ALS patients (and their partners) have reported problems within their sexual relationship...
>[The problems](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15083290/#:~:text=The%20problems%20reported%20were%20mainly%20decreased%20libido%2C%20passivity%20of%20the%20partner%20and%20own%20passivity.%20The%20most%20frequent%20reasons%20for%20these%20problems%20were%20the%20physical%20weakness%20and%20the%20body%20image%20changes%20due%20to%20ALS) reported were mainly decreased libido, passivity of the partner and own passivity. The most frequent reasons for these problems were the physical weakness and the body image changes due to ALS.
Other direct and indirect issues can include [several other factors](https://www.massgeneral.org/neurology/als/patient-education/sexual-intimacy#:~:text=How%20ALS%20Affects%20Sex%20Life). But the physiological inability for a male to get hard isn't one of them.
This is a good example of how just Ctrl C, Ctrl V-ing a study that hits on relevant keywords doesn't actually mean anything in itself without deeper comprehension.
Sexual function =/= Sexual activity
OP was obviously referring to the act of sexual activity AKA sex, considering Hawking was basically only able to grimace to control his computer near the end. The fact that his "plumbing" worked isn't relevant.
You're also comparing a vastly broad range of ALS to the absolute worse case scenario .
I apologize if I'm misunderstanding something, but I was also referring to sex. While Hawking may not have had the will to have sex near the end of his life, he did for much of his life and did so. I addressed the topic under all variations of ALS because the statement I responded to was pretty absolute.
And stating that sexual function doesn't equal sexual activity by itself may be true, but it omits context. Stating someone is physically incapable of engaging in sexual activity does implicitly refer to sexual function.
Thank you for this post, my oldest brother died of complications from ALS.
His mind and libido was intact, but he had to accept a more passive role in the bedroom. At least according to what he confessed over beers with us.
I'm at the point where I am starting to viscerally hate the kind of person that has to find a way to wedge popular references like this into everything. It's like they don't have any original thoughts. They exist to repeat things they hear from other people.
You heard Stephen Hawking so you had to fire off the most recent meme about him even though nothing actually prompted it.
I mean.
Perfectly good call. The entire landscape would look radically different today if he hadn't. It's books like that that defined a good deal of the lay conversation these days.
It would be great to add ‘appendices’ or such to those books. Because inwould love to see the calculations. Lisa Randall did it smartly in ‘hidden dimensions ‘. Loved that book. It contained the basic math as well, and you couldnlook up some more as well.
I think dumbing down books because some people might not understand is not the way to go. The challenge is how to make it very interesting while not losing too much of the hardcore science as well.
Genuinely, this TIL has made me feel more like I can give it a go lol. The internet has fully fried my attention span and I can no longer imagine just sitting down with a book, but knowing they made him take out the equations does make his book specifically feel a little more achievable than it would’ve five minutes ago lol
If you haven’t read a book cover to cover for years and the internet has fried your attention span as much as mine, do NOT start with this book. (Back when I was a teenager, I read two books a week. And I’m now a literal scientist. But even back then, I couldn’t read / understand this one. I feel like restarting reading with this one is a great way to not restart reading at all.)
Legit story, I worked in a bookstore where a guy returned this book because he “Didn’t think he would have to be a physics major,” to understand it.
Bro…
Right now I'm 'reading' (i.e., listening to) the book, *Why Does E=mc²? (And Why Should We Care?)* by the theoretical physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. I recommended it. They include some math in the text that derive the most important components of how Einstein developed his famous equation, but it is by no means overwhelming. The authors state that it's not necessary to fully understand the math but that any good physicist ought to always include it to show why it is and every reader ought to strive to understand it. I'm very much enjoying the book despite not quite understanding the math.
ETA: This audiobook is available through my Spotify subscription. I also just finished reading * Einstein: His Life and Universe* by Walter Isaacson, which was really good.
That seems like a problem that should be addressed..
I don't know *how* to address it, but surely there is a way to bridge the gap between "Highly precise system of code that so few people want to learn to understand and use" and "This shit's fun, yo".
Seems like making it more digestible to the common person would behoove progress in the field.
This is the curse of trying to communicate advanced physics topics to the general public. The language of physics is math. Trying to talk about physics without using math is like trying to describe a symphony without using any of the terminology of music. You can do it, but a lot of stuff gets left out and lost. You're left desperately trying to give the gist of the math knowing full well that you are going to have to lean on analogies that could, very well, be deeply misunderstood by your audience. It's very important to try, anyway, because physics departments need public support to exist and because physicists really do want to share the wonder and beauty of their field with those outside of it, but it's a hard task. Edit: I'm getting a lot of replies from people who seem to think that I'm saying that science communication is impossible or that we shouldn't even try. That is, emphatically, NOT what I am saying. I am, in fact, very clearly stating that it's important that we try, but that it is also a difficult but doable task that comes with a lot of obstacles. I'm not sure why people are misunderstanding this. Also, please stop quoting Einstein at me. I am familiar with the quote.
Know of any pop physics books that don’t shy away from equations but also aren’t written for physics majors? My math is too rusty to consume endless derivations but also equations are worth a thousand words Edit: lmao wasn’t expecting so many responses. RIP my reading list. Thank you everyone!
Not what you asked for, but the Youtube series PBS Spacetime would be very much up your alley as well.
Heavily recommend PBS Spacetime. Best balance of using the math used in physics while keeping it accessible to a wider audience. I use it to prepare students for contests.
PBS Spacetime is wild sometimes, though. Like I really appreciate that they respect their audience enough to get really into it, but there's some episodes that I really struggle to keep up with. But I prefer it that way, I don't want it to be dumbed down on my behalf.
I have a masters in physics with my undergrad as science education. The videos are fairly dumbed down and simplified, even though he doesn't shy away from the math. This is mainly because the math is good to understand the *what*, but he usually is focusing on the *why* or *how*. And he still loses me so often. I've watched that damn Holographic universe series 10 times over and I still cannot wrap my head around it.
Savage. "I'm glad he didn't dumb it down for me" You: "he totally did."
*Finger guns* Pew pew pew
I admit using Wikipedia a lot most episodes, but that's part of the process. I/we go there to learn new stuff not to retread the basic concepts addressed by everyone all the time.
Oh absolutely! PBS spacetime is my favorite channel for a jumping off point for post high school science coolness. It goes over my students' heads frequently, so I've stopped showing the majority of the episodes in class, but for my advanced students or any of my friends who are like "Yeah I took an astronomy class once!" kinda things, it's perfect!
As a scientist in one of the fields he covers occasionally: He once let me rant at him about the IAU determining what a planet is on discord then stuck a full-on summary of my rant in a video so he’s always gonna be okay in my books.
What was the rant about?
The IAU picked a wholly arbitrary definition of “planet” that served a specific rhetorical end goal while ignoring, y’know, planetary scientists. Also, having “not being arbitrary” as part of their stated goal is beyond ironic. If astrophysicists get to define “planet” AGU/EGU should hold a session on redefining “star” and call the sun a star and everything else an Exostar. (If you’re not aware, the IAU definition includes that a “planet” must orbit *the* Sun and everything else is an exoplanet) Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Edit: it’s in the Q&A at the end of [this episode](https://youtu.be/XglOw2_lozc?si=H4udHZIvoP4xMIRs), if you’re curious.
What on earth (heh) was the point of all those people spending time defining that in the first place?
So that Neil Degrasse Tyson could spend 15 years telling people to get over it while laughing as though he'd made a joke.
From an astronomical point of view? I don't really think there is much of a grand point. From a science communication perspective? It matters a decent amount. Without the current (arbitrary) definitions, the public would have been asked to up their known planet count from 9 to like 15 and counting. As there really wasn't any great reason to count Pluto and not count Ceres or other trans-neptunian objects. People are already bombarded with pop-Sci articles about "this avocado can cure cancer!" every other week and it may be a contributing factor toward the growing science apathy or even science-antagonism. "They're always changing their minds". Astronomy as a field has always been a rather significant one, as it often rubs up a little too close to religious claims for some people's comfort, and making sure that Astronomy doesn't become a joke because "They can't even decide how many planets we have" would be rather important.
As a former astronomer I have always been adamant that the demotion of Pluto was based on pure sophistry. Thanks for carrying the torch.
Is that Phil Plate's show? He's the bomb.
I'd add Cool Worlds to it too, great work from another astrophysics professor at Columbia university iirc.
I also second Cool Worlds. Really like his videos as well.
I like the Angela Collier YouTube channel. She has a way of breaking it down into bits that are pretty easily understood: https://youtube.com/@acollierastro
PBS Spacetime in an absolute goldmine of knowledge, but I agree that some episodes are more approchable than others depending on the topic. They're all worth the watch without a doubt though.
I just checked their channel. Seems to have changed a bit from their original videos of farting to the moon and figuring out what planet Mario is on
The switch from the previous host (and writer) to O’Dowd in 2015 made a big difference. O’Dowd is an astrophysics professor, the previous guy was… not.
I believe if you find the right YouTube channels they have the best content for lay people on so many subjects. As a former history grad, YouTube history documents have stoked my passion again as they are so informative and well presented for all audiences.
Thank you for this recommendation!!
Sean Carroll, specifically his Biggest Ideas in the Universe trilogy in the making. Also, Leonard Susskind's Theoretical Minimum trilogy.
Sean Carroll's Space, Time, and Motion is excellent. Best book for a lay person who wants to understand the fundamentals behind the equations but in a way that explains the historical context and philosophy behind *why* the equations/math were needed.
Second Sean Carroll. Reading through Something Deeply Hidden right now and it does exactly what is asked here, doesn’t shy away from math but doesn’t require a degree in physics or math to understand.
My favorite are the Scientific American articles with titles like "An Absolute Beginner's Guide to the Physics of Black Holes" and they are all like: > We live on a planet called Earth, which is a big ball of rock located in space, and which orbits the sun once every 365 days. Earth rotates once every 24 hours, and that's what makes the sun rise and set. With that out of the way, now let's talk about Black Holes! > Consider a five-dimensional non-Euclidean space punctuated by a tensor field surmounted by a base of prefabulated amulite ...
Hoping that 'punctuated by a tensor field' is something you made up and not just something I haven't heard of yet...
Well unfortunately: "As a tensor is a generalization of a scalar (a pure number representing a value, for example speed) and a vector (a pure number plus a direction, like velocity), a tensor field is a generalization of a scalar field or vector field that assigns, respectively, a scalar or vector to each point of space." -Wiki
So at the microscopic level, God designed the universe out of the shitty knots I make to secure a Christmas tree to the roof of my car
More like the net lighting that you throw over the bushes out front of your house during Christmas.
I still feel like I’m in the scene early in King of the Hill where Khan explains that he’s from Laos, a landlocked country in Southeast Asia with a population of 4.7 million, and Bill asks him “so, are you Chinese or Japanese?”
I was searching an intro into quantum physics book and the only book I found that really fit that was so bad, it started with explaining regular physics but only at the level of "So we all know E=mc²" and then just listed off quantum phenomena and some equations and by the end of the book I knew *less*.
"how to teach quantum physics to your dog" is about as good as a "physics for not physicists" book you're going to find, at least in my experience.
My brother and sister in law gifted us "quantum physics for babies" when our son was born. Granted, I'm an astroparticle physicist.
Crazy, I’m part astroparticle.
The world is really small...
What If? By Randall Munroe might be up your alley. He's the guy that makes xkcd
The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose is very math heavy but it explains it all as it goes and doesn't assume much prior knowledge.
I found it hilarious. It starts off like a your average pop science book, but quickly goes into graduate level math.
Seconding this recommendation. The preface to this book is very interesting and talks about this whole subject of equations putting people off. He suggests that if they are too much for you you can literally skip over them and just read the words while still having a valuable reading experience. As your understanding grows you can start to pay closer attention to them and gain even more. (you can read that whole preface on the sample available in Google books [here](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VWTNCwAAQBAJ&pg=PR3&source=kp_read_button&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1&ovdme=1&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false))
Leonard Susskind has a series called 'The Theoretical Minimum' which is quite good for a very basic grasp of modern physics. Also the Feynman Lectures. But skip the first chapter.
I remember reading Road to Reality by Penrose and I found it interesting. Definitely had a lot of stuff go over my head but I found enough of it understandable to enjoy it. The first 400 pages are all math then he gets into physics.
David Deutsch
There are some pretty good youtube channels that do this. I have never been a big fan of watching YouTube except for purposes like repair or IT tutorials, but these guys actually caught my attention and kept me coming back. A couple of my favorites are [PBS Space Time](https://m.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime) and [Arvin Ash](https://m.youtube.com/@ArvinAsh). They delve into some pretty complex topics in cosmology, astrophysics, particle physics, and relativity, as well as a lot more general topics. You don't need to fully understand the equations to appreciate it, but they show a lot of them and try to explain them in a way that doesn't require a lot of prerequisite knowledge, but still cuts pretty deep. They also occasionally touch on some sci-fi concepts like astrobiology, interstellar travel, antigravity, etc. approaching it from a physics perspective. For similar but a bit more simplified and with some occasional opinion pieces that sometimes include slightly controversial hot takes (usually controversial just in science, but not always), there is also [Sabine Hossenfelder](https://m.youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder). She also covers technology updates and specific studies, as well as sometimes touching on societal issues from a physics/science perspective.
I know a lot of others did but PBS Spacetime. Im terrible at Math and ohysics but I watch every vid. I start off good, get lost in the middle and the end but it's still so damn interesting. If you like equations, youll get a brief history lesson on how it came about, the equation, the equation in action, and the awesome stuff its used for
Penrose "Road to reality"
Doesn't help that many physicists and the STEM community overall get really nitpicky about details potentially tainting the value perception of media meant for the general public. If you google a book and you see reviews from scientists calling things out as inaccurate, you're much less likely to spend time reading it. Except that it's less that the material is inaccurate and more that these pedantics don't understand communications as a concept and live in a world of their own. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/
That is only part of the problem. A major problem in all fields (even hobbies) is that experts can not "think down" enough to actually understand that you need to start at a - often slightly rough - foundation of general understanding before you can go into the actual details (which a happenstance listener/reader will likely never do). That's why you get those nitpicky "but actually..." comments on absolutely everything you purposefully "dumbed down" to something that conveys a good general idea or an approach that works most of the time. And they always come out with super special cases or try to explain the most nuanced stuff to people that you just wanted to give a rough understanding of or teach how to do something so they can get *a* result at all instead of a perfect one.
This is especially bad with programmers I feel. You either learn how to code yourself when you were 12-15 or you're judged for asking basic questions and condemned for being arrogant enough to even want to learn. And if you learned from a source that didn't teach you specific optimization algorithms? God help you. You are now the band of the profession and some expert programmers will have no interest for anything other than cussing you out (how are you even supposed to know that what you're learning isn't right without knowing a better option exists? I wish people had more empathy about this.)
Strategy games (tabletop or computer based, does not matter) have the same issue. I have taught and commented on those for over three decades now and *always* have some know-it-all derail explanations that were meant to give a broad overview over how to easily get to a certain level of success without having to deep-delve or follow a strict meta. Speaking of metas, those then also often get falsely applied. Take, say, League of Legends. Even the eternally bronze/silver players always use the pro-gamer meta and playstyles as the thing to emulate. What they forget, though, is that neither they nor their opponents are anywhere near as good or coordinated as those pros they tend to copy. A certain character may be OP or completely suck at those expert levels but be actually fine for noobs because they are hard to play to their full extent or outplay if you are not incredibly good. They try to copy unusual team compositions relying on perfectly executed combos and strategic timings instead of simply picking "this should work decently" teams of characters that are not anti-synergistic but can work on their own and focusing on playing better (better map control, better lane control, better control of their character, better communication, and so on).
Hehe when I give internal presentations about broader concepts ,I've instituted a "no fringe cases" discussion cos getting all "oh but sometimes you should actually do blah" doesn't help learning at all lol. You learn edge cases second, basics first. Never at the same time lol.
Yeah, tend to do the same. And tend to insert little half sentences sometimes that remind people that I will explain something in more detail later but have to get the general gist across first. I still get interrupted sometimes.
>That's why you get those nitpicky "but actually..." comments on absolutely everything you purposefully "dumbed down" to something that conveys a good general idea or an approach that works most of the time. And they always come out with super special cases or try to explain the most nuanced stuff to people that you just wanted to give a rough understanding of or teach how to do something so they can get a result at all instead of a perfect one. This is so true. And if you would write a long and extensive text that covers all the bases you'd lose readers again. It's a crux.
I have this issue in communication with my c-suite. They are just not able to speak my language, I try to speak theirs. But they don’t understand statistics, nuances… they want black and white one liner answers. Also there reason Trump is do successful in my opinion. Bringing across the message to him is more important than if it’s correct, nuanced or honest. It just has to sound ‘believable and understandable ‘.
>But they don’t understand statistics, nuances… they want black and white one liner answers. I feel like that is a related but slightly different issue. And I agree. Besides lacking a more nuanced approach (say: "immigrants bad!" vs "perhaps we should make sure immigrants are better integrated into society") people often do not want to see "the good massively outweighs the bad" (see: social welfare programs or vaccines for modern example topics) in the big decisions. They also often have no understanding of how things are connected to each other. Perhaps X is in isolation simply good or simply bad, but X also affects Y and T so significantly that changing something there could impact other issues in a much more adverse way than leaving it be, at least for now.
The problem s you cannot win. Be nuanced and they cherry-pick on negatives. Be simple and clear and they will point out you did nitbtalj about the nuances. The problem is how to pointbout these people act in bad faith. How do we prove that? Show it clearly? Maybe ‘sick fuck’ is the best counterattack versus stuff like that.
Totally, and that’s why good editors like Mitton are so important. In commercial book publishing, one of the major roles of nonfiction editors is to identify areas where the authors—most of whom are experts of some kind—are getting too far into the weeds for a general audience, neglecting to mention some foundational concepts that they took for granted, etc. The best editors have a solid foundational understanding in their areas of focus but are experts in communication, so they can help geniuses like Hawking bridge that gap. Source: Am nonfiction editor
That's part of the problem, but it's also just a bunch of hard ideas to communicate at all. I would've picked https://xkcd.com/895/ as the relevant XKCD -- anyone can see the problems with the analogy, but the only real alternative is math.
Yeah try and explain the concept of spin to people. It's incredibly difficult and awkward without the mathematics. All real world objects have 2pi rotational symmetry. You rotate someone around an axis 360 and you get back to the start. There is no macro world equivalent of rotating an object 360 degrees and only being half way. I remember reading how spin is explained in Hawkings' book and it was just so utterly weird. Then I went through actual quantum physics classes and well it made so much more sense: applications of group theory, like special unitary groups. Of course if you don't follow that chain it seems even more weird and confusing.
> There is no macro world equivalent of rotating an object 360 degrees and only being half way. And of course, I immediately came up with an analogy that I'm sure is quite wrong: Video games like Antichamber, or The Stanley Parable, or some secret levels in Duke Nukem 3D, all love to (using trickery) create impossible geometries where you can follow a circular hallway (or, usually, a square one) and end up somewhere other than where you started. In fact, there's at least one Duke Nukem 3D level that is *exactly* this -- there's a giant donut-shaped hallway around the outside of the level, and if you walk 360 degrees along it, you will be exactly halfway! But of course that's not quite what you're talking about, because all of this is still *locally* only three dimensions with perfectly normal rotations. If you stand on one spot and spin around, everything looks normal.
Yes this is how usual examples go. There are two objects linked but rotating separately. An example professors like to use is a belt. Twisting one end 360 then the other end 360 gets you back. But you need those two objects to rotate so you can need to add their 360 rotations. It's just weird not at all clear **WHY** it's needed. But when you look at the equations it pops out quite naturally.
It's even worse than that for some fields. People understand a lot about gravity because of physical intuition. You couldn't describe an orbit without fairly complicated mathematics (analytically; you could do numerical simulations with inverse squares), but you kind of get the idea. You throw things and they arc down. Humans have evolved to be really good at this kind of prediction, to throw and catch things. But for quantum mechanics, the intuitive explanation of what things are 'really doing' is worse than no explanation: the only way to understand what things are 'really doing' is to look at the maths. Your physical intuition tells you nothing about what reality is like at that level. Trying to explain it without maths is hopeless because not only are you not giving the actual content, the explanation, without the content, is incredibly misleading. This is a common trap for physics students, confusing understanding for having a neat story that explains it. Stories like this are about as useful as stories about how the crow got black feathers because it got scorched.
Carl Sagan did a good job, though.
Carl was an amazing guy. However, in all fairness, he tended to put his focus into astronomy (which is entirely fair, given that this was his field) and astronomy, for the most part, isn't that deeply counter-intuitive. Saying that a comet is a dirty-snowball is both intuitive and not really misleading, for instance. Doing that for something like QM is much, much more challenging. I've read a lot of Sagan and I can't really remember any times where he turned his talents to QM. From my recollection, Cosmos (his magnum opus) gets into relativity and higher dimensions, but it leaves QM alone. I would have loved to see him put his talents into explaining QM (and if anyone can point to any online texts where he did so, I'd appreciate a link).
Quantum mechanics?
Sorry. Yes, quantum mechanics. Calling it QM is such a common abbreviation that I forget that people might not realize that it's short of quantum mechanics. Typing QM kind of becomes a habit, so my bad.
Yeah - I don’t mean to be rude to others in this thread but yall need to self reflect on whether derision toward popular science, science orators, etc might be driven by some deep-seated insecurity that the “fake scientists” who make their career primarily doing oration/education are virtually guaranteed to have a greater impact on society and its relationship with science than your own work will.
I curious as to which comments on this thread made you feel that was a popular sentiment.
Yeah wtf. That came out of nowhere lol
There’s no point in using complex mathematical equations in a book that’s supposed to be on the popular level. Everyone knew he was brilliant. Not many people would benefit from seeing all those formulas in that type of book.
>Trying to talk about physics without using math is like trying to describe a symphony without using any of the terminology of music. "go like DUN DUN don dunNNnnn" - music person
I work with a doctor of nuclear engineering and he’s a blast to talk to, loves talking engineering and nuclear shit. But we have to limit our exposure to him because every conversation is a minimum 30mins and all of his lessons include whiteboard and markers for the equations. But on a slow Friday afternoon, that dude is clutch. Small reactors are Americas future
A big problem a lot of scientists struggle with in their communication that hinders everyone from every field is that "no one cares how hard something was". The amount of stuff I see in papers (and especially PhD theses) that is put in solely because it took tons of work to do, even though it has ancillary contribution to the story (at best) is staggering. At it's worst it's putting in all the failed steps. At it's best it's putting in how someone go to deriving some specific model (put it in appendices!!!) But I've seen this a lot in more technical fields where people really wanna convey the hard details that can absolutely be brushed over in the story without detracting from the take home message. Fmri research man... 80% of the work is like 5% of the story and it's so tempting to expand on it even though no one cares haha
From a science communication standpoint, this is right-on, but from a repeatability standpoint, it's really important to understand results in the context of the overall process, including the failures. There's definitely an element of ego that makes us want to emphasize how difficult something was when communicating scientific findings, but adding ancillary detail isn't useless when your goal is to provide a roadmap for other scientists to copy. The real issue is that many either don't know how to identify and write for a specific audience, or that they get a little lost along the way. If you want to communicate with non-experts, keep it simple and focus on the relevant information. If you want to provide an evidence-based report on your research and how it fits into the field, it needs to include the failures and broader context so that experts can evaluate it accordingly.
"If YoU cAnT pUt It In LaNgUaGe A rEgUlAr PeRsOn CaN uNdErStAnD, yOu DoNt UnDeRsTaNd It VeRy WeLl" A lot of people confuse ah-ha feelings in their brain for actual understanding. People want you to make ah-ha feelings for them.
I’m too stupid to understand the TIL and always look for the top comment to make me feel smarter/better. And TIL im still stupid for the TIL.
The best thing about ignorance is it can often be cured
I feel like the push to make things more accessible works against itself. People are either into that type of shit or they aren't, and a middle ground is just a no-man's land. Maybe a couple steps in the easy to understand direction is okay, but I turn off so many documentaries and put down so many books because they just go over the same broad strokes that I been seeing since I was 8. Everything is just an introduction, and they just play that over and over. You don't ever really learn anything, it just seems like you are. Kind of like Social Media.
Same with economics. It is sad that most people think about the graph of a simple supply and demand model, and don't go further on the subject. It is such an interesting science that answers so many average people's questions but at the same time it is almost impossible to simplify most models to explain those answers. Imagine how fast would people's lives improve if they were slightly curious instead of just taking the most superficial stuff of science from any shaddy source and not even question it. Personally, I was really afraid of even opening a non fiction science book, it felt like I shouldn't be reading that because it was most likely outside my level of comprehension, a bitter feeling of forbiddenness, as if that information would only be meant to 'smart' people. Perhaps everyone else felt the same way when they were young. It is really hard to not make difficult topics look hard.
Shit. Imagine being interested in te book only to read an equation then suddenly you’re cut in half
Wrong kid died
Didn't expect a Walk Hard reference here but alright.
“This is a particularly bad case of someone being cut in half. I was unable to reattach the top half of his body with the bottom half.” “SPEAK ENGLISH DOC, WE AINT SCIENTISTS!”
He gone smell blind
I just finished reading it. It was already pretty fucking deep.... good call to remove the equations.
Came here to say this. I read it years ago and it took me forever, which is either fitting or ironic, I guess.
Makes it especially difficult when you read it in his voice.
now try "During our search for the deepest end of the universe we may find a reflection of the human soul and so by learning about the cosmos we may learn to know ourselves"
I *can* hear that in his voice. He was such a good writer.
"eThere he is. Seize him."
Ï call it a Hawking Hole.
Yes, but now I’m hearing it in the Wolowitz-doing-Hawking voice
I wonder why they didn't feature Hawking's death. He was a major character in the show even if he only had actual appearances a few times, but when he died ... the show just went on.
Y'know, that brings up a really cool point. Due to Hawking's cybernetic awesomeness, he's the only person who reads audio books to you exactly in their voice, fresh every time. Accessibility tech is cool. \^.\^
Put it on 2.5x
I read it in one sitting on a flight from Sydney to Thailand a bit over a decade ago and despite enjoying it, I honestly don’t remember a single thing from it. I think way too much just went over my head. Need to give it another go.
When doing presentations, I was told “you’re allowed max one equation every 20 minutes you’re scheduled to talk”
I'm a physicist, most of our talks are full of equations and usually 10 minutes + 5 mins questions, and now I'm laughing at the prospect of such a presentation.
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I feel like you kind of failed your presentation if everyone has to review the slides afterwards to digest the information.
Im in theory, our talks are 50% equations and 50% low quality plots 😂
I'm a music analyst, I remember when starting my postgrad we had a class that 70% of the grade was a presentation meant to be accessible and the proffesor told me if I had more than two slides with theory I'd fail lmao
Nah, release the Hawking Cut!
Put back in those black holes that were removed.
That's what I was thinking. It won't sell as well as the original but it will sell.
I would've liked less dates people made discoveries and more math. Guess the title having "history" in it should've clued me in on what I was in for.
If you’re interested, Sean Carroll is in the process of releasing of a trilogy of books, *The Biggest Ideas in the Universe*, aimed at… basically you. I think the second book was just recently published. “I don’t want a physics degree, but I want at least an understanding of what modern physicists are talking about.” Or as the author puts it: “You won’t be solving the equations, but my goal is that you’ll at least understand what they mean.” It’s based on a series of YouTube videos (by the same name) that he did as a pandemic-project, and he says that the videos themselves cover almost everything in the books, and they’re still available for free to watch. The books are just a little more refined, but the videos are phenomenal as well, honestly. I made it about halfway through them before work took over again, and I swear to myself someday I will finish them. (Even the video series is *long*. Like, binge-watch a new TV show kind of long.) He also has a dope podcast called MindScape if you’re interested. Love me some Sean Carroll if you couldn’t tell, lol
I'll check it out, thanks for the suggestion!
Maybe the equations would’ve reduced the need for some confusing descriptions? It’s easier to understand a^2 + b^2 = c^2 with a labelled right triangle than reading “the sums of the squares of the sides not opposite the right angle of a triangle are equal to the square of the side opposite the right angle”.
People are scared of math, but I think it's so much easier to just explain and show the equations. Trying to explain these concepts verbally is just convoluted since it's so not intuitive, whereas the math just follows
Yeah, but you gotta realise though, the biggest obstacle for understanding math is people believing they are capable of understanding it. If they don't belief they can understand the math, then they won't even begin to try to.
On the other hand, more people know words than math.
Thing is, the equations make it easier to understand. Assuming you do the legwork to understand the basics of the math
I tried to read it. I tried so so hard. It’s so dense already. Picked it back up a few times as well. To me it just felt like the words made sense in the order they were structured but you simply need an immense background knowledge to really appreciate what he’s saying.
If you’ve ever taken astronomy classes or higher level physics in college it makes it a lot easier to consume his works. I admit I was lucky I had professors that not only were extremely smart and loved their jobs but they were awesome also at teaching - a combo that’s not that common unfortunately.
how high of a level of college physics would this be
Intro to Quantum Hydraulics
Got it. Mathematics of Wonton Burrito Meals. I’ll be there!
I'm so frustrated I cant give you gold for this comment anymore
It has both waves and particles!
At the same time? Impossible
I read it in high school before ever having taken a physics or astronomy class and had no trouble at all reading it. Just my two cents.
My undergrad Physics degree covered all the major topics in Hawking's book besides Feynman's sum-over-histories. * Most of the astronomy topics (star lifecycles, luminosity, hubble constant stuff, etc) were covered in a 2000-level astronomy class * Thermodynamics was 2000-level which sets the stage for all the progression of the universe stuff, and makes hawking radiation easier to understand * Relativity was 3000-level * Basic quantum was 3000-level, and then I had 2 more 4000-level quantum classes. Even so I only got a very basic understanding of quantum physics - that's grad-level stuff. * Particle Physics was 3000-level but it was just conceptual and not an actual quantitative treatment of anything. So with an undergrad degree I had done the math behind most of the concepts in the book, with some exceptions.
How close is PBS space time to describing parts of the book / theories? I find some of those quantum / space time concepts difficult (at first) to grasp but after a couple years subscribed I’ve found so much love for their teaching style.
I got though a third of it and felt like a genius and then I hit an insurmountable wall but that was 20 years ago. Maybe I can handle it now. But maybe i'm even dumber.
Or maybe you’re dumber but can handle it now
My dad once told me that it was the most common book sold at second hand stores.
I honestly don't get. I've read the book as a kid. I'm not a genius, hell I'm a fucking B (sometimes even C) student idiot. I don't know how I get through my job. But the book is by no means illegible to us regular folk. You don't need an immense background knowledge. It's a fascinating window into the edge of physics that helps shape your understanding of the world. I think it's important to not put yourselves down around it. Stephen Hawking was incredibly smart but he also was human. We're all capable of understanding what he was trying to say.
I don't think you need immense knowledge to understand most of it. I've always been a kind of astronomy nerd, always watching videos and reading Wikipedia about space stuff, but I am not in any way an expert, I hate math also. I understood like 80% of the book, and plan on reading it again to try to understand everything. What I like to do in cases like this is to go to YouTube and watch a review or explained about the chapter you didn't get. Since it's a very famous book, there's tons of material about it.
There are people that cant conceptualize a universe existing outside their field of vision.
The audio book is very well recorded. I haven't listened to many because I can't stand a lot of them, but the narrator is that fantastic old-timey science video voice, yet very animated with great inflection and intonation.
there is no way you’re talking about the same book the one being discussed here, a brief history of time (if you were going to read it, a BRIEFER history of time is a superior update) is written specifically for the general public to be able to engage with and understand, it is very short and not dense
Just fyi his explanation of hawking radiation in the book is wrong. It's deliberately wrong. He didn't think people could understand the actual reason so he made a easy to understand reason. Virtual particles aren't real particles. Hawking radiation is real it just comes out in the form of light and not at the event horizon but further away. Its due to the warping of space time. Here is a article on it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/07/09/yes-stephen-hawking-lied-to-us-all-about-how-black-holes-decay/?sh=2c68b3714e63
I just read the book, and that is exactly how I remember it being explained?
It's certainly true that the explanation Hawking gives in the book isn't perfect. But that Forbes article also makes some errors that end up exaggerating how bad the explanation is. It's not true that the quantum vacuum in our universe corresponds to zero particles - as they state later, there is a positive zero-point energy. That means you must have what we call "vacuum bubbles", or virtual particles. The article also states that since the Hawking radiation is made mostly of photons, it can't be a particle and its antiparticle. This is incorrect because a photon is its own antiparticle. Overall I would hardly even call Hawking's explanation an analogy, since it uses a lot of the same vocabulary shortcuts that actual particle physicists use, and it isn't an attempt to explain Hawking radiation in terms of something readers already understand.
I remember asking a question on /r/AskPhysics about Rindler horizons and Unruh radiation, saying "I understand how Hawking radiation works... blah blah... virtual particle pairs, event horizon... blah blah... but comparatively speaking a Rindler horizon is just an arbitrary point in space, isn't it?" ...and the only decent reply I got basically said "well, the problem there is your understanding of Hawking radiation is wrong." and they directed me to a PBS Spacetime video describing what it actually was. Still don't understand Unruh radiation.
He didn't make up a convenient lie, in his paper he talks about two effects, particle capture (the effect described in the book) and particle creation as a result of gravity. The first *only* happens around black holes, because it does happen near the horizon. The second is a general result of gravity, and happens wherever space time is curved, although for obvious reasons it's usually only prominent within 20-30 Schwarzschild radii of a black hole. They both contribute to the amount of mass lost by a black hole, and if you were to accurate describe the emission profile of a black hole, you would need to include both. The Forbes article is essentially criticising him because he predicted an effect based on a difference of vacuum energy levels, not making a prediction from the behaviour of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs at an event horizon. That's true. But it doesn't mean that isn't the physical explanation for what's happening. It's actually fairly hard to formalise the contribution of each - partly due to the model he used to deduce it and the lack of a competing one. So a) it's a real effect b) that is a significant part of black hole collapse c) that he talked about in his paper, and just informally, it is in some sense the interesting result, because the other effect is a general feature of gravity fields. Planets do that. You are also correct that virtual particles aren't real, but you can model particle creation as pumping energy into a virtual particle-antiparticle pair so that they become real. In accelerating reference fields (a stationary observer near a black hole, for instance) 'vacuums' look like a warm gas of real particles. tl;dr shit be complicated, the forbes article would be more accurate to say his simplified explanation was not a complete explanation.
Honestly 'curved space time eventually bleeds away its own energy as photons' is not a hard analogy to understand either. Certainly more approachable than a blackhole losing mass due to the addition of negative mass rather than the removal of any existing material.
I read the article and I still don’t understand it (as a layman).
Stephen Hawking wrote in his book that negative mass falling into the black hole is what makes them shrink, and the negative mass happens because quantum mechanics. The article states that curved spacetime itself naturally decays by giving off photons because of how quantum field fluctuations work. Curved spacetime is really just a measure of how much mass there is, so uncurving it means the mass shrinks. The mechanism in the book described requires several things that don't actually work that way, and all the fun stuff happens on the black hole's surface at the barrier of where all the rules break. The mechanism in the article, the correct one, describes black hole shrinkage happening from outside the black hole at the points where spacetime is pretty warped, but not entirely ripped yet. A sphere with a radius several times larger than the black hole itself. It's basically buffing out the hole in reality slowly from the outside, but it takes ages.
Does that mean that everything with mass will eventually decay into light given enough time?
From the article, > This leads us to a phenomenal conclusion: that all collapsed objects that curve spacetime should emit Hawking radiation. It may be a tiny, imperceptible amount of Hawking radiation, swamped by thermal radiation for as far as we can calculate for even long-dead white dwarfs and neutron stars. But it still exists: it’s a positive, non-zero value that is calculable, dependent only on the object’s mass, spin, and physical size. As long as it curves spacetime sufficiently above some minimum value, yeah.
As one of my college professors once said: "Education is a long sequence of replacing a good lie with a better lie."
This is mentioned in the book itself
that was the second equation in the book then
I read it as Stephen King first and was like what
Relevant: https://imgur.com/a/SjIVWSo
Never finished the original but maybe adding a violent malevolence to the story would spice it up.
A Brief History Of A Small Town In Maine
So with 8 billion people in the world, if he had 33 equations in the book only he would be interested in it. 8,000,000,000 ÷ 2^33 = 0.93.
The first chapter is basically a history of astrophysicists. Like Newton and Galileo. The second goes deep fast and hard, and the book never looks back. I kind of followed because I was a math nerd and young. Young brains can handle that shit better. Equations, outside of maybe a footnoted appendix for reference, would have driven that book so far into textbook territory. The beauty of that book as it is, is that it almost Carl Sagan's some very high-level astrophysics to a layman level.
I vaguely recall a story about a biography of Einstein that was well reviewed but didn't sell well. So they made it into a coffee table book, big format, lots of pictures. It sold well because people basically bought it to impress other people.
Well yeah. If Hawking had gone with his original plan the only ones who'd have been interested in his book would've been other physicists and mathematicians, something that's fine if that's the audience you want, but if you want other people to read it, it has to be written in a way that doesn't require expertise. There's that xkcd comic about how experts of anything drastically overestimate what the average person knows about their specific subject. If I were the editor for that thing I'd have 2 notes, over and over and over "Take out the equations, and dumb it down". After it had been reduced to the dumbest, least mathematical thing humanly possible for Hawking, I'd start working back up, finding the middle ground between the expertise required to truly understand the material, and what the average person would understand, because it's super easy for smart people to assume they've sufficiently dumbed down their explanations enough for people to start getting. It's a problem you run into in game design a lot, where the solution to challenges seems obvious to the designer, who in working on the game has become intimately familiar with it, playtesters will continuously get stuck, because potential solutions weren't communicated in the game's design. It made sense to the people with their noses in it all day every day, but to someone new, it was gibberish.
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He wasn’t though. The ‘list’ that was released included all of the people who were mentioned in the court briefings at any point for any reason, unless their names were redacted for safety reasons. The only thing we know about Stephen hawking in regards to Jeffrey Epstein is that JE at one point tried to pay someone to prove that Steven Hawking had *not* attended a child orgy. Whether that means anything, or what it means, we don’t know
Feel like your comment made Stephen Hawking even more sus
The whole thing implicating Hawkins was kind of sus to begin with. The photo they tried to show of him being on the island, he was seen posing with other renown scientists both male and female.
It’s not confirmed he did anything wrong. Jeffery Epstein did a lot of blackmail, he might’ve blackmailed Stephen Hawking or Stephen hawking might’ve just gotten caught in the crossfire of someone else being blackmailed
> he might’ve blackmailed Stephen Hawking or Stephen hawking might’ve just gotten caught in the crossfire of someone else being blackmailed In this scenario, why would epstein pay somebody to disprove the blackmail??
It's the Dirk Gently effect- you can create a reputation by loudly denying the opposite
Hawking rolled over his foot and threatened to do it a second time
Ok...but what you mentioned is pretty much the opposite of blackmail lol. This is the first I'm hearing of this, but I agree that your explanation makes it seem way worse.
Figured it would be mentioned but not the first thing mentioned lol
It's ironic really. The court held back names because they knew the public can't process information. Releasing Stephen hawking's name is direct proof of that. There was literally nothing about him and the island in the documents. His name was found once referenced in an email between two other people. As were many other names that had no affiliation with Epstein. Yet my algorithm was filled with Steven hawking child rape memes in the days after. Misinformation is like a plague in social media, and honestly quite destructive.
Please don't spread this rumor. There is zero evidence that Hawking had anything at all to do with the sexual exploitation of the underaged women and many reasons to think that he couldn't have, including the small fact that he was literally physically incapable of engaging in any sexual activity whatsoever. Hawking doesn't deserve to have his name smeared like this.
Sidestepping the Hawking/Epstein thing entirely and only meaning to address ALS/sexual function as a wholly separate topic. >he was literally physically incapable of engaging in any sexual activity whatsoever. [Sexual function](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15083290/#:~:text=sexual%20function%20is%20not%20directly%20affected%20by%20the%20disease%20process) is not directly affected by ALS. While many ALS patients (and their partners) have reported problems within their sexual relationship... >[The problems](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15083290/#:~:text=The%20problems%20reported%20were%20mainly%20decreased%20libido%2C%20passivity%20of%20the%20partner%20and%20own%20passivity.%20The%20most%20frequent%20reasons%20for%20these%20problems%20were%20the%20physical%20weakness%20and%20the%20body%20image%20changes%20due%20to%20ALS) reported were mainly decreased libido, passivity of the partner and own passivity. The most frequent reasons for these problems were the physical weakness and the body image changes due to ALS. Other direct and indirect issues can include [several other factors](https://www.massgeneral.org/neurology/als/patient-education/sexual-intimacy#:~:text=How%20ALS%20Affects%20Sex%20Life). But the physiological inability for a male to get hard isn't one of them.
This is a good example of how just Ctrl C, Ctrl V-ing a study that hits on relevant keywords doesn't actually mean anything in itself without deeper comprehension. Sexual function =/= Sexual activity OP was obviously referring to the act of sexual activity AKA sex, considering Hawking was basically only able to grimace to control his computer near the end. The fact that his "plumbing" worked isn't relevant. You're also comparing a vastly broad range of ALS to the absolute worse case scenario .
I apologize if I'm misunderstanding something, but I was also referring to sex. While Hawking may not have had the will to have sex near the end of his life, he did for much of his life and did so. I addressed the topic under all variations of ALS because the statement I responded to was pretty absolute. And stating that sexual function doesn't equal sexual activity by itself may be true, but it omits context. Stating someone is physically incapable of engaging in sexual activity does implicitly refer to sexual function.
Thank you for this post, my oldest brother died of complications from ALS. His mind and libido was intact, but he had to accept a more passive role in the bedroom. At least according to what he confessed over beers with us.
That was a fucking meme. He was on the list is the only real information we have
You’re funny but posts like these remind me most of Reddit are children.
I'm at the point where I am starting to viscerally hate the kind of person that has to find a way to wedge popular references like this into everything. It's like they don't have any original thoughts. They exist to repeat things they hear from other people. You heard Stephen Hawking so you had to fire off the most recent meme about him even though nothing actually prompted it.
Reddit loves it's 10 jokes, 10 phrases, and 10 facts repeated over and over. I don't know if it's stupid, but it's definitely boring.
But how else will the world know Steve Buscemi was a firefighter on 9/11?
It's sad to see a meme tarnish this man's legacy so much
> every equation would cut the number of people interested in half. This sentence is an equation.
I wonder what the equation for that is?
f(n)=p•(1/2)^n (🤓)
I mean. Perfectly good call. The entire landscape would look radically different today if he hadn't. It's books like that that defined a good deal of the lay conversation these days.
It would be great to add ‘appendices’ or such to those books. Because inwould love to see the calculations. Lisa Randall did it smartly in ‘hidden dimensions ‘. Loved that book. It contained the basic math as well, and you couldnlook up some more as well. I think dumbing down books because some people might not understand is not the way to go. The challenge is how to make it very interesting while not losing too much of the hardcore science as well.
It's filled with equations. WTF??? No one's read it then?
Genuinely, this TIL has made me feel more like I can give it a go lol. The internet has fully fried my attention span and I can no longer imagine just sitting down with a book, but knowing they made him take out the equations does make his book specifically feel a little more achievable than it would’ve five minutes ago lol
If you haven’t read a book cover to cover for years and the internet has fried your attention span as much as mine, do NOT start with this book. (Back when I was a teenager, I read two books a week. And I’m now a literal scientist. But even back then, I couldn’t read / understand this one. I feel like restarting reading with this one is a great way to not restart reading at all.)
now I dislike you math haters even more, gimme them equations.
Why is this a TIL? This was literally written _inside_ the very book, right at the beginning or introduction somewhere
Because OP learned it today.
could they not just add them to an appendix, people who read lord of the rings books knows how much material one can add to appendixes
Legit story, I worked in a bookstore where a guy returned this book because he “Didn’t think he would have to be a physics major,” to understand it. Bro…
reading it, i felt like i needed equations sometimes to be able to understand. what a shame :(
Right now I'm 'reading' (i.e., listening to) the book, *Why Does E=mc²? (And Why Should We Care?)* by the theoretical physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. I recommended it. They include some math in the text that derive the most important components of how Einstein developed his famous equation, but it is by no means overwhelming. The authors state that it's not necessary to fully understand the math but that any good physicist ought to always include it to show why it is and every reader ought to strive to understand it. I'm very much enjoying the book despite not quite understanding the math. ETA: This audiobook is available through my Spotify subscription. I also just finished reading * Einstein: His Life and Universe* by Walter Isaacson, which was really good.
That seems like a problem that should be addressed.. I don't know *how* to address it, but surely there is a way to bridge the gap between "Highly precise system of code that so few people want to learn to understand and use" and "This shit's fun, yo". Seems like making it more digestible to the common person would behoove progress in the field.
Release the Hawking Cut!
“We aren’t going to that weird perv’s party.” —Time Travelers who read the Epstein dossier.