Physics is a strange subject. It deals with the most fundamental properties of the physical world, yet unlike many such ideas, it doesn't seem to give me any insight on the day-to-day experience of the world. At school I did Ok in physics by going through the motions of solving the problems, without understanding much about what i was doing. This left me with a very bitter taste. It was boring and seemed to comprise of meaningless symbol manipulation. The symbol manipulation in Physics is a key problem. It's inconsistent and in-expressive; the "clever" bits aren't in the representation, it's just short hand for the real explanation, an agreed way of referring to a specific idea. Like notes for a talk, but pretty meaningless by itself, Gerald Sussman IN The Role of Programming says it sucks.
Contrast that with computer languages which are completely self contained, any discussion about a computer program will always be less complete then the source code itself (assuming it runs on an idealised machine). What is computer science?
Particles and Waves, a PBS TV program has finally given me a glimpse of what Physics is really about. It's about giving humans, who can never experience the very large and very small, a way of visualising these things which doesn't involve drugs or psychotic hallucinations. This program explains the conflicting views of light as either wave or particle and shows how physicists in the 20th century resolve this dilemma in a very elegant way. But more interestingly, it shows how the ideas came to be. How people working together and over several generations brought together bits of the puzzle, sometimes adding a new element, sometimes extending or reusing existing ideas to refine and deepen the understanding of matter and energy.
Regardless of how this relates to reality and the very practical implications of these ideas, I am bewildered by the power and elegance of the methods used to construct them. Solutions to problems that seem fundamentally beyond the ability of humans are gradually teased out and shaped in a way that is accessible to us at an almost intuitive level.
This talk by physicist Murray Gell-Mann, a rather nasty man about creative thinking, is a bit dull. When asked about the practical implications of something, his initial response is that there are none (and ridicules the asker). But some of his talk is about how the "business" of physics is done. This is from someone in the "trenches" of physics which is why I find it so interesting.
