But I think I'm learning the trick of indifference to unimportant things -- which, if you believe the Stoics, is the same thing as peace of mind.
I don't think I'm quite there yet. I imagine it would involve being so sure of (and so right about) your estimates that you know that when the world appears to act bizarrely, it's not you, it's them; and I'm not that confident yet. (Alternately, you could deliberately decide to do your thing and let the world do its thing, but that, too, requires a certain degree of strength - in that case, of independence - so that if you guess incorrectly, you're not affected.)
A great deal of science has no, or at least no immediate, technological application -- most of general relativity and particle physics, for instance.
Making GPS accurate and designing nuclear reactors? :p I get your point, though - the second's rather a stretch.
...I think spending a year and a half as a computational physicist left me a bit doubtful about the ability of computing to help science -- I mean, it does, but the problem of chaos shows up everywhere.
The problem of chaos, I suppose, means that you can only look so far before sensitivity to initial conditions makes short work of anything you might try to infer from the data. It seems, though (even if I'm no expert here), that the actual data-gathering has improved quite a bit, and made possible investigation in areas that earlier were quite dark. As an example, I'm thinking of cladistics in biology, where computers can throw great amounts of processing power onto the problem of hierarchical classification.
(Incidentally, your reference to sublinear advances makes me think of particle physics again - I seem to recall hearing that they don't scale with respect to the kinetic energy, so we aren't going to get much further than current energy levels without impractically large accelerators. Is that right?)
I really do hope I can make this career work, though... it would be nice to have one of the increasingly rare jobs that isn't the equivalent of pushing bits of paper around. I want to take part in actual progress, not consume false progress.
Yes. The coding I do now feels a lot more like "plumbing" (for the lack of a better word) than the sort of coding I did on my own. It's not exactly pushing pieces of paper around, but it's next to - it's telling a computer how to push virtual pieces of paper around. I like discovery and invention, and that, it is not - but if I wanted something in that direction, I should have endured the educational system, I guess.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2011-10-07 08:34 pm (UTC)I don't think I'm quite there yet. I imagine it would involve being so sure of (and so right about) your estimates that you know that when the world appears to act bizarrely, it's not you, it's them; and I'm not that confident yet.
(Alternately, you could deliberately decide to do your thing and let the world do its thing, but that, too, requires a certain degree of strength - in that case, of independence - so that if you guess incorrectly, you're not affected.)
A great deal of science has no, or at least no immediate, technological application -- most of general relativity and particle physics, for instance.
Making GPS accurate and designing nuclear reactors? :p I get your point, though - the second's rather a stretch.
...I think spending a year and a half as a computational physicist left me a bit doubtful about the ability of computing to help science -- I mean, it does, but the problem of chaos shows up everywhere.
The problem of chaos, I suppose, means that you can only look so far before sensitivity to initial conditions makes short work of anything you might try to infer from the data. It seems, though (even if I'm no expert here), that the actual data-gathering has improved quite a bit, and made possible investigation in areas that earlier were quite dark. As an example, I'm thinking of cladistics in biology, where computers can throw great amounts of processing power onto the problem of hierarchical classification.
(Incidentally, your reference to sublinear advances makes me think of particle physics again - I seem to recall hearing that they don't scale with respect to the kinetic energy, so we aren't going to get much further than current energy levels without impractically large accelerators. Is that right?)
I really do hope I can make this career work, though... it would be nice to have one of the increasingly rare jobs that isn't the equivalent of pushing bits of paper around. I want to take part in actual progress, not consume false progress.
Yes. The coding I do now feels a lot more like "plumbing" (for the lack of a better word) than the sort of coding I did on my own. It's not exactly pushing pieces of paper around, but it's next to - it's telling a computer how to push virtual pieces of paper around. I like discovery and invention, and that, it is not - but if I wanted something in that direction, I should have endured the educational system, I guess.