I am eternally grateful to him for destroying our illusions and telling us the bitter truth.
we could calculate the atomic processes precisely. By 1951, we had triumphantly finished the atomic calculations and were looking for fresh fields to conquer. We decided to use the same techniques of calculation to explore the strong nuclear forces.
[Fermi said:]
"There are two ways of doing calculations in theoretical physics", he said. "One way, and this is the way I prefer, is to have a clear physical picture of the process that you are calculating. The other way is to have a precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism. You have neither...
....To reach your calculated results, you had to introduce arbitrary cut-off procedures that are not based either on solid physics or on solid mathematics....
....my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Getting the elephant's trunk to wiggle
The Nature essay, A meeting with Enrico Fermi, by Freeman Dyson is worth digesting. I quote below a few bits that stood out to me:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Emergence and protein folding
Proteins are a distinct state of matter. Globular proteins are tightly packed with a density comparable to a crystal but without the spatia...
-
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro...
-
If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new mat...
-
I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
No comments:
Post a Comment