wait are you a nuclear physicist?

Have you ever been through school, Pommy?

It doesn't make you some kind of special person. There's no threshold you can point to where you're suddenly an expert. No matter how much schooling you have you're still susceptible to memory loss, biases. Let's be honest.. 90% of that stuff is gone a few years down the road anyway. Schooling yields to the narrow routine of work.

What would you suggest instead?

I have been through school, and though I agree with you 100% that everyone is susceptible to memory loss and bias, I don't think that negates the purpose of school. I also think it depends on the school. If you go to a vocational or professional school, the things you learn in school are used regularly. If you go into academia, then school (and all the skills you've developed from it) is your career. I also think 90% is a little bit hyperbolic, as most people in college still use skills they learned in elementary, middle, and high school (math skills, writing skills). Many upper-level courses depend on lower-level courses that you took years ago, and the people who are in them still retain what they need to retain.

I also think that for certain topics, there is a "threshold" at which at least you become qualified for something you were not qualified before. A simple example would be if you learned how to cook an egg. Prior to learning how to cook an egg, you would not be qualified to cook eggs. As soon as you become able to successfully cook and egg and comfortably reproduce the process, you are qualified to cook eggs. I think the same would apply to professional/vocational schools, albeit in a more complex way.
As far as the "special person" bit -- I'm not sure what you mean. I certainly don't think that an educated person and an uneducated person have been exposed to the same breadth and types of information in their lives -- and so by definition, someone who is educated is different than someone who is uneducated, and vice-versa -- so if you want to call "different" special, then both educated and uneducated people are special when they are in the minority.

Me? no, that's poley. I'm a college student.

theres nobody i can see named poley =[ unless thats slang for something and not a name =[

im asking because im in college now i want a phd in theoretical physics, or some kind of physics, just want some info

poley = James Bond and works for CERN

You should PM him or something

Yes, when I said 'absolute fact' I meant things that we take as fact. Because I agree that absolute fact doesn't exist in such a context.
Everything you've said in your post I completely agree with.
See, I was making my post trying to see it from the 'crazies' perspective, that is not my own. Like I said, anyone who tells you "what you're told about -blah- is all lies" they are undoubtedly trusting lies fed to them from someone else.
Not that everything they are being told is wrong (or right), there's a lot of bullcrap in this world, and you've just gotta sift through it and decide for yourself what you believe.
I believe it's a good idea to listen to your doctor, if someone else thinks the doctors are trying to mind control them... well I'm not going to bother arguing with them

Yeah, this is sort of what bothers me. It seems to be fashionable (especially on the internet) to say "don't be sheeple," "open your eyes," "do your research," etc; i.e. proclamations against blind acceptance and groupthink. Yet, this sort of rhetoric is precisely driven by groupthink -- it's the "enlightened" way of thinking, and if you don't think in such a way, you're a mindless drone. What? It's also these same proponents of anti-sheepleism that regurgitate other (factually wrong or overgeneralized) endlessly repeated 'popular' sentiments, so basically, the "sheeple" are telling other people to not be sheeple, except it's not some "ominous government force" or big corporations that are brainwashing them, it's each other.

Those are the same people who will buy iPads.

I think they are also the same people who won't buy iPads. It works both ways (people who latch onto some oft-repeated defense/justification for iPads, and people who endlessly proclaim the same "accepted" list of flaws) -- if there's a belief that can stick, is easily repeatable / understandable, and popularized, then it will inevitably become the only belief that is right in the minds of the believers and forestall any further possibility of a believer changing his or her mind until it is no longer fashionable to think such a thing (if that ever happens)

Good thing the choice is removed from by software requirements, so I don't have to think about it.

Couldn't have said it better myself, Pommegranate, there are many sides to an argument, and most of them have many sheeple involved.
"Open your eyes, do your research" is often said by someone who has read a pamphlet of biased information and devoted themselves religiously to the small info they've received.

Make up your own damn mind, I say, and listen to arguments on all sides. Once you have an opinion, feel free to argue it, but nothing in life is ever set in stone... not even stone.

What do you want to know? What classes are you currently taking in college?

You don't necessarily have to come from a pure Physics background to do a useful PhD in Theoretical Physics. You might think that an academic career offers an ever-narrowing path of specialisation, closing off doors at every choice, and to a certain extent that is true - until PhD and postdoc, where you propose your own research ideas.
I have a Masters degree in Theoretical Physics, yet I'm currently studying to do a PhD in Theoretical Chemistry - despite not having done any Chemistry for 8 years. It's ****ing hard, I have to teach myself about 4 years of undergrad Chemistry in less than a year (though not all of it is entirely relevant), but it's doable.

The key skill is mathematics. You'd be amazed at the amount of options you open if you have a rigorous understanding of high level mathematics.

As someone said previously in this thread, knowledge is indeed less important than skills. I have a friend that has memorised the periodic table. I have an iPhone app that does exactly the same. He possibly retrieves information slightly faster, but when you're beyond the need to memorise **** for exams that doesn't really matter very much (you don't take exams for a PhD, generally speaking). However, mathematics is a skill, not regurgitated knowledge - and a very useful one.

Of course, this is also why people get second and third opinions. Just because they're a Doctor doesn't mean they've properly diagnosed you.

Basically, all an education is for is a foundation. An education gives you the bare minimum tools for truly learning the subject matter in the real world. I don't think someone having a degree constitutes them as being qualified to speak on a particular subject matter. Someone fresh out of college knows and understands relatively nothing compared to someone who's worked in the field for 10 years (rather or not they have a degree or formal education).

IT is another good example. IT Education tends to lag way behind when compared to other subjects/fields. Someone who get's their foot in the door straight out of high school may be better off 4 years down the road then if they went to college to get a degree in IT. All a degree does is make it easier to get your foot in the door for your first job in a particular field or industry. After that, it's experience and successful projects that make you the most qualified candidate. If you can do that with out spending 4+ years and the associated cost at a second tier institution, then go for it.

That's not to say there isn't something to be said about the college experience.

Today's SMBC is relevant.

except for comps. ugh.

But what you say about math is right on.

Someone with a PhD in the liberal arts who couldn't cut it in academics.

I know why e^(i*pi) is -1.

:smug:

But a PhD is so specific. They wouldn't even be any good at it.

Don't be so dismissive about people with humanities PhD's. The way things are set up right now, the system happily sucks undergrads into doctoral programs without telling them that there basically is no job market for people with degrees in humanistic fields. When 100+ people are applying for every job (and very few of those are full time/tenure track), it's hard to insist that someone's failure to make a living in academia is a personal demerit.

Because **** you that's why!!!

what are you talking about??

There are professors retiring from tenured positions all the time! if people can't get hired it's because they aren't good enough. </university>

http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846 is a great article

I enjoy reading Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog. What he writes about mainly is how terrible science journalism is. He argues that one of the main reasons this matters is because it "teaches" people that science is a free-for-all and you can believe what you like.

Goddamnit! I used to know this... I forgot, the only thing I didn't forget is e^(i*a) = cos(a) + sin(a) * i... that's enough to figure out where the number is in the complex plane, and figure out it is -1.

But **** you, tell me why!

There's a variety of different ways in which you can prove this, I quite like the proof from ODEs but the forum limits how many images I can post, so I've given the simplest and shortest one here. You can do the other proofs yourself.

Starting with this function f(x), that may or may not be complex


We want to know more about the behaviour of this function, so we take the first derivative - using the rules we know about taking derivatives of products, exponentials and trigonometric functions. I recommend trying this yourself, it's a very good function to test out your calculus skills.

Because the first derivative is equal to 0, we know this function is constant for all values of x. Because we know f(0), we can work out this constant

Multiplying both sides by e^{ix} we get Euler's formula,


This is true for all x, but for certain values of x interesting things occur. If we take x=pi, we get

Using sin and cos functions in radians, we know that

and

from which it follows that

rearranging gives the most beautiful identity in the world

You have alot of my respect.

for being able to pass math 31?

edit: originally posted this as first year university math but I forgot you are Albertan.

I covered that bad boy in one of my first two years (I was drunk through both of them, so couldn't tell which one). Brings back memories

It's a pretty straightforward result. I never actually covered it.

that's a really elegant proof. Just awesome

The beauty of Euler's identity not in the simplicity of its proof, but the implications it has for mathematics. It shows the five most fundamental mathematical constants, and their associated mathematical fields, are closely interconnected

• e, Euler's number, the irrational transcendental number that is the unique result of being the same value as the first derivative wrt x of itself to the power x, and the basis of exponential functions that appear in number theory and calculus
  
• i, the imaginary number, defined as the square root of -1, the entire basis of complex analysis
  
• pi, the irrational ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter, the basis of geometry and trigonometry
  
• 1, the identity element for multiplication
  
• 0, the identity element for addition

This is a highly non-trivial result. There is no obvious reason for why such seemingly unrelated ideas should be connected at all, let alone connected with such simplicity. Geometry describes what we see around the world, we can see circles with circumferences and diameters and easily observe their ratios to be constant. But i is not something we see, we can never observe imaginary numbers, it is simply something we have invented, as is the notion of addition and multiplication and e is just some quirk that emerges out of the system that we have built.

Surely geometry must be the fundamental basis of all mathematics, from which everything else is built?

Euler's identity shows that geometry is not the fundamental basis of mathematics, it is simply one part of some wider, deeper reality that is closely connected to entirely abstract concepts. It shows that these abstract concepts are not things we have invented out of practical necessity, they are fundamental truths that we have discovered. We may have invented the letters to denote them, but they represent ideas that exist outside ourselves.

Before I came across this equation, I thought mathematics was just a tool that we had invented and that we used to solve problems and do useful work. It was an incredibly useful tool, certainly, but nothing more profound than that.
This equation shows that mathematics is a fundamental description of reality. And not just the reality that we observe, all possible realities. We observe the parallel postulate to be true in our reality, but with mathematics we can construct realities where the parallel postulate is not true - and explore this world mathematically even though we can never even conceive of it. And we know, that even in that alternate reality, then this will be true:

Ehhhh.... Making the jump from "hey! there's this cool thing in this system that I've created" to "holy ****: transcendent beauty = ultimate truth!" is pretty much exactly the reasoning that leads to the concept of God. Euler's identity is beautiful, but only in essentially the same way that Beethoven's Fifth is beautiful.

When a statement has to be true because you can't imagine a reality in which it isn't true, that tells you something about the statement, not reality.

Imagine a universe in which 1+1=3. You can't, because of the ways in which 1, 3, + and = have been defined. That doesn't tell me anything about the nature of our universe, or of any other conceivable universe.

...

Think about how the identity would be different if we had defined pi as the ratio between the radius of a circle and its circumference.

Edit: More importantly, they aren't even slightly as 'unrelated' as you make it sound. Pi and e are both obtained by taking limits at infinity... the fact that they aren't obviously related in *utility* does not say anything about how unrelated they are in *reality.*

Integers mod 1, it's just not very interesting.

The direct connection between Euler's identity and the existence of God is messy at best, and it can be used as a platform for either side of that argument. However, it does have profound implications for the philosophy of mathematics. Proponents of social constructivism argue that mathematics is a social construct, a product of human culture (much like language, that humans have invented and mathematical ideas only exist within the sphere of human culture. This argument stems from the trivial observation that 'doing mathematics' is a human activity and so must be subject the same cognitive biases as any other human activity (including racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, there are many arguments to remove these biases from mathematics).
But this is a pretty obvious statement, and this argument tells us nothing at all about the highly non-trivial results that mathematics arrives at.

The objects in Euler's identity come from entirely different mathematical fields, entirely different histories, entirely different origins of construction, entirely different uses and applications, their inventions separated by thousands of years and many different human cultures. So if these concepts are so inseparable from human culture, why are they all linked by this single equation? They weren't invented so that they would fit this equation.

The only conclusion is that they weren't invented at all. Mathematics is discovery, not creation, and mathematical truths exist outside the sphere of human culture. When a mathematical theorem is proven to be true, then it will always be true. It has always been true. And because mathematics, unlike science, does not depend fundamentally upon any feature of our Universe then neither does mathematical truth. A mathematical truth will remain true even after the end of our Universe, and also in any possible Universe.
That one can read theological answers into these implications does not surprise me, but I think 'God' is just a trivial solution to the ontological nature of mathematics while the reality we discover is far more complex and meaningful.





Then we'd have a factor of two in Euler's identity, or we'd have a different symbol. The mathematical concepts would still have the same relation to one another. The symbols we use to represent mathematics are fairly obviously a human creation, but the ideas are not.

I'm surrounded by nerds.

No you're not, friend. Not entirely.

http://forums.massassi.net/vb3/showthread.php?t=56356