In about a month many of my friends will be graduating. It's a bittersweet thing. On one hand, they now get to enter real life. On the other hand, they now have to face real life. Of course, I don't give a damn about their trials and tribulations. Doing that would make me a Real Person, and as a UChicagoan I traded all of my empathy for the ability to rant about comedy theory for 24 hours straight. Their graduation affects me in the regard that I'll never talk to them again.
It's a simple problem. People only talk if they're in contact. Tautological. But contact is hard to maintain. People use facebook, but it's hard to make that meaningful. Calling and email is better, but nobody uses that. I should, because it forges powerful connections, but GUESS WHAT: unless I have a responsibility to email, I won't email!
Oh wait.
What if I made it a responsibility to email? Not that emailing becomes a chore, but that I have to do something I want to. Not tricking myself, but building additional structure into my life to make something I want to be important more important. So I'm going to slowly over time build an emailing list, where I must email certain people on certain days. I can email other days, but I must email those days too. Going to start tomorrow with a couple of names, then add from there.
Showing posts with label Rambling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rambling. Show all posts
2012-05-02
2012-03-05
Word Puzzles
I love word games. Not all of them, though; things like scrabble and bananagrams never held much appeal to me. Mostly I like the ones that focus on properties of words. Word puzzles are even better. I find it incredibly fun to search for words with a given property, whether etymological, definitional, or even just structurally. Plus you can play them in your head anytime, anywhere. Here are some of my favorites. My best answers are linked.
Shortest word with all five vowels: http://tinyurl.com/7s5cpnu
Longest word without any vowels: http://tinyurl.com/88vadcg
Longest word with only one vowel: http://tinyurl.com/6upsokt
Longest word with only one type of vowel: http://tinyurl.com/6wfbmb (yeah, I'm kinda fixated on vowels)
Longest word with alternating vowels and consonants: http://tinyurl.com/894pped (if we can count y as a vowel)
Longest word with only one consonant: http://tinyurl.com/6pafg2o
I need to find some new ones. Any ideas?
Shortest word with all five vowels: http://tinyurl.com/7s5cpnu
Longest word without any vowels: http://tinyurl.com/88vadcg
Longest word with only one vowel: http://tinyurl.com/6upsokt
Longest word with only one type of vowel: http://tinyurl.com/6wfbmb (yeah, I'm kinda fixated on vowels)
Longest word with alternating vowels and consonants: http://tinyurl.com/894pped (if we can count y as a vowel)
Longest word with only one consonant: http://tinyurl.com/6pafg2o
I need to find some new ones. Any ideas?
2012-02-26
Crowd Running
I'm an aggressive walker.
It's kinda like being an aggressive driver. If something is in my way, I try to get around it without slowing down. I can't call it parkour or anything, because it's less about gymnastics and more contortions. If somebody walks into my way, I twist around them. If a crowd of people are milling about, I move through the tiny spaces between them. I win if I don't touch anybody or anything before I finish. The challenge comes from the fact I have to slow down as little as possible. That's what makes it harder than it sounds.
The more I do it, the more automatic it becomes. It's reached the point where I no longer even think about slowing down or walking around people. My body habitually warps around the obstacles. Kinda cool in most situations, but definitely not when the crowd running would be embarrassing or dangerous. My new challenge is to not crowd run. I think it's gonna be a lot harder.
It's kinda like being an aggressive driver. If something is in my way, I try to get around it without slowing down. I can't call it parkour or anything, because it's less about gymnastics and more contortions. If somebody walks into my way, I twist around them. If a crowd of people are milling about, I move through the tiny spaces between them. I win if I don't touch anybody or anything before I finish. The challenge comes from the fact I have to slow down as little as possible. That's what makes it harder than it sounds.
The more I do it, the more automatic it becomes. It's reached the point where I no longer even think about slowing down or walking around people. My body habitually warps around the obstacles. Kinda cool in most situations, but definitely not when the crowd running would be embarrassing or dangerous. My new challenge is to not crowd run. I think it's gonna be a lot harder.
2012-02-23
Exploration
There are secrete places all over the university. Most aren't so much hidden as unnoticed For example, you can get from Gordon to Cummings without going outside. There's a tiny garden outside the Reg that only Max P's seem to know about. Five blocks from the edge of campus is the oldest sculpture in the city. The list goes on.
I've always been fascinated by this stuff. It's like we live in an art gallery. My first year I tried to find all of these places. There are a few common ones I haven't been in yet- like the Harper basement- and I've only recently been in the OI library. Still, I like to think I know more about these places than the average student. Fun fact: Our IDs get us into Rosenwald and Stuart. At night, the emptiness lends a surreal atmosphere. Sometimes I go in to run around and write papers.
Rockefeller has tours of the bell tower every Sunday. I really should go.
I've always been fascinated by this stuff. It's like we live in an art gallery. My first year I tried to find all of these places. There are a few common ones I haven't been in yet- like the Harper basement- and I've only recently been in the OI library. Still, I like to think I know more about these places than the average student. Fun fact: Our IDs get us into Rosenwald and Stuart. At night, the emptiness lends a surreal atmosphere. Sometimes I go in to run around and write papers.
Rockefeller has tours of the bell tower every Sunday. I really should go.
2012-02-22
Noticing
People never notice. When they walk into a room full of people, they tune the crowds out. When they start focusing on their work they never stop and look up, see how the room around them has changed. People never look at ceilings or (if possible) what's happening below. I think it might be a processing trick- it's a lot easier to
do stuff if you aren't constantly blasted by information overload.
I've been making an effort to be more aware of my surroundings. That means whenever I walk into a cafe I do a loop to see who I recognize, and taking breaks from my work every few minutes to get up and look around. I've managed to see dozens of familiar faces this way. People I haven't seen in weeks or months. They're always surprised when I walk up to them. Either they glazed over the crowd when they walked in, or didn't notice when I did.
Just the other day I was eating in one cafe when a good friend walked right past me and sat down at an adjacent table. I waited ten minutes before leaning over and poking him. His first question was "how long have you been there?"
do stuff if you aren't constantly blasted by information overload.
I've been making an effort to be more aware of my surroundings. That means whenever I walk into a cafe I do a loop to see who I recognize, and taking breaks from my work every few minutes to get up and look around. I've managed to see dozens of familiar faces this way. People I haven't seen in weeks or months. They're always surprised when I walk up to them. Either they glazed over the crowd when they walked in, or didn't notice when I did.
Just the other day I was eating in one cafe when a good friend walked right past me and sat down at an adjacent table. I waited ten minutes before leaning over and poking him. His first question was "how long have you been there?"
2012-01-29
Wordjot - Metahumor
Wordjot - Metahumor
“What’s the difference between Plato and Playdough? One’s so pliable you can mold it into whatever the hell you want. The other’s blue.”
Humor relies on the subversion of expectations. That’s why the Plato joke is funny. You have a normal situation: Wise Plato and putty Playdough. Then it’s suddenly reversed. But it only works because it taps into another expectation: that Plato is frustratingly vague in a lot of ways and easy to use to support anything. The punchline wouldn’t work as “One’s so pliable you can mold it into whatever the hell you want, the other FISH FISH FISH FISH FISH.” Your subversions are subverted. It’s still stupid.
I’ve recently been fascinated with another form of subversion: the metajoke. These play on your expectations of what a joke is. Some examples:
“How many people of a given stereotype does it take to change a lightbulb? N+1, 1 to change it and N to act in a stereotypical manner.” This points out the general template of the joke. This form is pretty common.
“A man walks into a bar. He’s an alcoholic. It’s destroying his family.” Antihumor, which subverts the expectation that there’s actually a joke.
“A rabbi, a priest, and a lawyer walk into a bar. The bartender asks ‘Is this some kind of joke?’” These directly call attention to the fact you’re hearing a joke.
“What’s the difference between a telephone pole and a motorcycle? 24, because a camel has two humps.” Possibly the most common type I’ve encounter, which derives it’s humor from the fact it makes no sense. Often called ‘Monkey Cheese’. I hate this kind.
Recently I’ve been really interested in another form, the joke dependent on another joke. Here’s one example:
“There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who know binary, and those who don’t. And those who know ternary.”
Not a great example, but still. It takes your expectation that this will be the common, heard-this-a-million-times-before joke on binary, and then plays on that. I’ve found these types really funny. They’re not that funny to most people, but since I’m really into humor theory I absolutely love them. That probably doesn't speak well about my sense of comedy.
“What’s the difference between Plato and Playdough? One’s so pliable you can mold it into whatever the hell you want. The other’s blue.”
Humor relies on the subversion of expectations. That’s why the Plato joke is funny. You have a normal situation: Wise Plato and putty Playdough. Then it’s suddenly reversed. But it only works because it taps into another expectation: that Plato is frustratingly vague in a lot of ways and easy to use to support anything. The punchline wouldn’t work as “One’s so pliable you can mold it into whatever the hell you want, the other FISH FISH FISH FISH FISH.” Your subversions are subverted. It’s still stupid.
I’ve recently been fascinated with another form of subversion: the metajoke. These play on your expectations of what a joke is. Some examples:
“How many people of a given stereotype does it take to change a lightbulb? N+1, 1 to change it and N to act in a stereotypical manner.” This points out the general template of the joke. This form is pretty common.
“A man walks into a bar. He’s an alcoholic. It’s destroying his family.” Antihumor, which subverts the expectation that there’s actually a joke.
“A rabbi, a priest, and a lawyer walk into a bar. The bartender asks ‘Is this some kind of joke?’” These directly call attention to the fact you’re hearing a joke.
“What’s the difference between a telephone pole and a motorcycle? 24, because a camel has two humps.” Possibly the most common type I’ve encounter, which derives it’s humor from the fact it makes no sense. Often called ‘Monkey Cheese’. I hate this kind.
Recently I’ve been really interested in another form, the joke dependent on another joke. Here’s one example:
“There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who know binary, and those who don’t. And those who know ternary.”
Not a great example, but still. It takes your expectation that this will be the common, heard-this-a-million-times-before joke on binary, and then plays on that. I’ve found these types really funny. They’re not that funny to most people, but since I’m really into humor theory I absolutely love them. That probably doesn't speak well about my sense of comedy.
2012-01-24
Wordjot - Spy Eye
I’ve occasionally wondered what I’d do if I ever lost my eye. I’d probably replace it with a spy cam. I’d wire the trigger to my eyelid, so I could trigger it by blinking. Two blinks would be video. Don’t know how I’ll handle zoom or flash, but I’ll figure something out.
Cameras are supposed to capture the world, right? But you can’t, not entirely as it was.
The camera is an inside-out Schrodinger’s box. The act of aiming it changes the scene. At the very least people clean up their postures and start looking uncomfortable. At worst the nice men in gas masks take it away and hit you with sticks. It’s hard to take a picture of the world as-is instead of world as wants-be.
That’s why I want a Glass Eye glass eye. It’d give me the power to take pictures without people realizing I’m taking pictures.
Or maybe I should just buy a spy pen.
Cameras are supposed to capture the world, right? But you can’t, not entirely as it was.
The camera is an inside-out Schrodinger’s box. The act of aiming it changes the scene. At the very least people clean up their postures and start looking uncomfortable. At worst the nice men in gas masks take it away and hit you with sticks. It’s hard to take a picture of the world as-is instead of world as wants-be.
That’s why I want a Glass Eye glass eye. It’d give me the power to take pictures without people realizing I’m taking pictures.
Or maybe I should just buy a spy pen.
2012-01-23
Wordsomething - MC Escher
I'm trying to figure out a new thing to call this. Wordsmithing sounds trite, and Wordblasting stupid. Wordbombing? Word Vomit? Wordering? Advice needed.
---
MC Escher
MC Escher is probably my favorite artist. I guess a lot of math majors think that. He made a lot of neat tessellations and impossible constructions. But I’ve always preferred the mindbenders. “Another World”, “House of Stairs”. I’m irrationally fond of his “Tower of Babel”, one of his earlier and less acclaimed pieces before he found fame in optical illusions.
I think the reason I love these pieces is what they do to reality. Most of the art I’ve come across either tries to represent the real world, like realism or cubism, or represent ideas, like Suprematism or modernism. Escher on the other hand feels like he’s destroying reality, presenting something that Can Not Be. It goes beyond normal optical illusions and impossible constructs into a sort of Lovecraftian insanity. My mind can tell there’s something but cannot comprehend the totality of it. To really get “Waterfall”, I feel like I’d have to break spacetime.
Which got me thinking. Escher uses 2D to go beyond 3D. Could you take that one step further? Maybe you could use 3D to go beyond 4D, like build a sculpture that- from the right point- looks exactly like a tesseract. Why haven’t we done this? Maybe Escher was a rare genius. Maybe we’d have to see 4D to know how to smash it. Maybe people have already done this and I’m just ignorant. No matter what, I’m excited to see what people do with it. If people do something with it. Here’s hoping.
---
MC Escher
MC Escher is probably my favorite artist. I guess a lot of math majors think that. He made a lot of neat tessellations and impossible constructions. But I’ve always preferred the mindbenders. “Another World”, “House of Stairs”. I’m irrationally fond of his “Tower of Babel”, one of his earlier and less acclaimed pieces before he found fame in optical illusions.
I think the reason I love these pieces is what they do to reality. Most of the art I’ve come across either tries to represent the real world, like realism or cubism, or represent ideas, like Suprematism or modernism. Escher on the other hand feels like he’s destroying reality, presenting something that Can Not Be. It goes beyond normal optical illusions and impossible constructs into a sort of Lovecraftian insanity. My mind can tell there’s something but cannot comprehend the totality of it. To really get “Waterfall”, I feel like I’d have to break spacetime.
Which got me thinking. Escher uses 2D to go beyond 3D. Could you take that one step further? Maybe you could use 3D to go beyond 4D, like build a sculpture that- from the right point- looks exactly like a tesseract. Why haven’t we done this? Maybe Escher was a rare genius. Maybe we’d have to see 4D to know how to smash it. Maybe people have already done this and I’m just ignorant. No matter what, I’m excited to see what people do with it. If people do something with it. Here’s hoping.
Project: Wordblasting
Two days ago I complained about how it's really hard to reach out to people in Facebook. Yesterday I realized I had a bunch of small writing ideas that couldn't carry their own project, but might be fun to share. Today I realized that G was never going to update Momenergy ever again. This gave me an idea.
I'm going to start updating Momenergy again with these bits and scraps of rants. Each one I will also send to three random people on Facebook and see how they react. The rants probably won't be available on general Facebook, but they'll always be accessible here.
Have two completely written out, one on MC Escher and one on metahumor. Going to upload them both over the next two days.
I'm going to start updating Momenergy again with these bits and scraps of rants. Each one I will also send to three random people on Facebook and see how they react. The rants probably won't be available on general Facebook, but they'll always be accessible here.
Have two completely written out, one on MC Escher and one on metahumor. Going to upload them both over the next two days.
2011-09-01
A Challenge to G
I come back from my job in Chile and find out he made only two posts since I left. I'm sure G has an excuse like "but I had so much wooooooork", but I had a similar workload as him and spent all my free time hiking around and shit and still managed to throw up 30+ posts. Obviously G needs a little motivation. Therefore I send a CHALLENGE!
Often when I was flying around I'd be stuck in a seat I didn't like, a middle seat or an aisle seat. Now I know that there are a lot of people who'd prefer aisle seats just as I prefer window ones. The way the system is set up you can't switch with them. You can pick a different available seat if the plane isn't completely full, but there's no way for two people to use the system to trade seats. This isn't a problem if the two people are friends, or can talk to each other. But how can we arrange trades between strangers? How do I know that the person two rows behind me would gladly switch his window seat for my aisle? As the systems currently work, you can't.
So the CHALLENGE: G, you must work out an adequate system that would ensure that, after all seats are assigned, people can swap seats with strangers. If you succeed, I will owe you a pie of my choosing. If you fail, DEATH.
By reading this, G, you implicitly agree that you will accept this CHALLENGE. You have 10 days.
Often when I was flying around I'd be stuck in a seat I didn't like, a middle seat or an aisle seat. Now I know that there are a lot of people who'd prefer aisle seats just as I prefer window ones. The way the system is set up you can't switch with them. You can pick a different available seat if the plane isn't completely full, but there's no way for two people to use the system to trade seats. This isn't a problem if the two people are friends, or can talk to each other. But how can we arrange trades between strangers? How do I know that the person two rows behind me would gladly switch his window seat for my aisle? As the systems currently work, you can't.
So the CHALLENGE: G, you must work out an adequate system that would ensure that, after all seats are assigned, people can swap seats with strangers. If you succeed, I will owe you a pie of my choosing. If you fail, DEATH.
By reading this, G, you implicitly agree that you will accept this CHALLENGE. You have 10 days.
2011-07-02
Correlation and Causation
Correlation does not necessarily imply causation is probably the first lesson taught in a first course in statistical inference. In the second lesson, we are told that "the point" of statistical inference is to come up with "good" theories that explain the observed correlation. (What constitutes a good theory is the subject deserving of its own post!) A lot of times, we remember the first lesson, but don't really remember the second.
Take a look at newspapers that publish shocking results from studies, like increased ice cream sales linked to increased crime; or children attending a lot of 4th of July parades tend to grow up to be Republicans. These correlations are undoubtedly interesting, so it isn't surprising that the media would use these results as headlines. But in doing so, the most important 90% of the social science has been neglected: the causal mechanism that explains why ice cream sales are related to crime, or what the hell parade attendance have to do with party identification.
A lot of times, I see people disregard these studies as being unbelievable because the media overemphasizes the shocking correlations, so the more important causal mechanism that actually sheds light on the situation becomes second in priority. The readers, painfully aware of the first lesson, probably find it hard to translate the correlation to a real life explanation, so they dismiss the result. This is where people start to contrast "those studies" with reality.
It is true that an unexpected correlation can be the seed to developing a neat theory that explains it, but we should never forget that the causal mechanism is still the most important. I want to know it is warm weather that leads to increases in both ice cream sales and crime (more crime because the weather permits staying outside more). I actually don't see how the parade one works without being super cynical.
Take a look at newspapers that publish shocking results from studies, like increased ice cream sales linked to increased crime; or children attending a lot of 4th of July parades tend to grow up to be Republicans. These correlations are undoubtedly interesting, so it isn't surprising that the media would use these results as headlines. But in doing so, the most important 90% of the social science has been neglected: the causal mechanism that explains why ice cream sales are related to crime, or what the hell parade attendance have to do with party identification.
A lot of times, I see people disregard these studies as being unbelievable because the media overemphasizes the shocking correlations, so the more important causal mechanism that actually sheds light on the situation becomes second in priority. The readers, painfully aware of the first lesson, probably find it hard to translate the correlation to a real life explanation, so they dismiss the result. This is where people start to contrast "those studies" with reality.
It is true that an unexpected correlation can be the seed to developing a neat theory that explains it, but we should never forget that the causal mechanism is still the most important. I want to know it is warm weather that leads to increases in both ice cream sales and crime (more crime because the weather permits staying outside more). I actually don't see how the parade one works without being super cynical.
2011-06-13
Linux
I spent most of yesterday trying to boot Linux on my netbook. To make things interesting, I formatted my hard drive first. All of my old data gone in a flash. Until I got Linux working I wouldn't have a computer. I'd have to use the public one, the one my brother uses to watch the same 'comedy' videos he has the past five years. This was, of course, A Problem. It remained A Problem over 15 hours and five distros. Eventually I pinned it down to a problem in the power management software and got a netbook remix of Fedora working on the comp. Pretty sure I botched a few things on the way. Such is the price of change.
Of course, my job on this blog is to ramble insanely and occasionally talk about physics, not complain about Linux. My thoughts keep coming back to the erasure. Of course I saved the important things. But a sane person would have made sure Linux actually worked before they torched their system. Or they would have had a backup of the old OS, in case they wanted to go back. Hell, why even do Linux? I don't have a major need for it. I can say I wanted to start anew, but then I should have just wiped and replaced Windows.
My family thought I was crazy. And they were right. What I did was possibly the most irresponsible thing I could have done, short of chucking my computer out a window. I knew all of that going in. I knew, I typed in the commands, that there was a good chance I would never get the computer functioning again. And yet I did it anyway. And I have to keep asking myself why.
Okay, I know why. The thoughts make perfect sense in my head. Mostly I was asking myself how to explain it. There are two factors at work here, both drives that most people would call insane or stupid. First of all, I had to erase my hard drive so that I had the risk of it not working. This is difficult to describe. We have to face the consequences of our premeditated actions. But consequences are fickle and unpredictable. We have no way of knowing what will fizzle out and what will go too far. Repercussions blindside us. Mastering the art of response is kinda like trying to shoot by getting randomly pushed into warzones for five minutes at a time. We have to find a way to train ourselves by manufacturing our own potential crises. We can't ignore it, because we engineered it to be unignorable, and we cannot complain, because we knew it would be our own damned fault. All we can do is respond. That's the reason I erased everything first.
So why Linux? Linux is something I cannot use as well as Windows, something I'm completely unfamiliar with, something that would cause me great difficulty if I switched to it. Why not Linux? Comfort leads to complacency leads to stagnation. Better constantly shift my world very slightly, make myself eternally uncomfortable, than risk that. I've always been a person obsessed with flux. In confusion and chaos we find ourselves.
I have no idea how much sense these reasons make to another person. All I know is that these are massive driving forces for me. Switching to Linux isn't going to revolutionize my life, but it will continue to familiarize me with taking these unpleasant and beneficial actions. I guess you could ask are they really beneficial. Who knows? Maybe making chaos more comfortable will itself lead to stagnation, and ten years down the road I'll find new driving forces to combat that.
*G's job is to actually be insightful.
2011-06-01
The Problem of Conceptualism
I have a confession to make, a confession that will probably bar me from theoretical physics forever: I'm a conceptualist. No, not the philosophical kind. Jury's still out on whether universal qualifiers can exist. I'm a physical one. I believe that everything in physics should be understood in terms of physical concepts.
The physical part is important. There are two ways to analyze anything in physics. The first way is with math. If you take the Poynting vector of an oscillating dipole you see that there is energy at infinity. Bam, radiation. But this doesn't tell you why you get radiation. In order to get that you'd have to notice that due to finite propagation time an oscillating dipole creates expanding "kinks" in the electric field. These kinks look like waves. Ergo radiation. This is conceptualizing the problem, recasting it in terms of what the world is actually doing.
Obviously mathematics is important in physics. You can't quantify anything without it, and without quantification you don't know whether your bridge will fall down or explode. What about qualification? Do we need conceptualization? Certainly it helps all physics before 1915 or so. Einstein built special relativity entirely off of gedanken, or conceptualization experiments. Things started getting a little tricky with quantum mechanics, though. It's really goddamned hard to imagine a probability wave, and the uncertainty principle is designed specifically to mess with our heads. Then you get deeper. Cosmology. Particle physics. String theory. The deeper you go the more the qualification becomes math. There is no physical reality happening, just math becoming macroscopics. Do isospin and hypercharge even exist? I have no idea.
I want to believe that conceptualization is still important. Certainly it becomes important in applied physics. If you can't imagine how the physics interacts with your intentions, then you fail as a technologist. I do not know how to rationalize it for pure physics. Surely you can get an understanding of what is going on without caring about it's physicality? But then we're no longer doing physics. We're doing reality math. That does sound pretty cool, but it also seems almost antithetical to the ideas of both reality and math.
There is one possibility to patch it up. We know from special and general relativity that there are things we know are real, but far to complicated for the human mind to comprehend. That's why we represent them entirely mathematically. This bothers me for other reasons that I will not go into now, because it is convention nonetheless. This allows for reality to be happening at the particle level while still requiring that the only qualitative analysis be mathematical. This is probably going to be the way it's going to go.
But what about the skills of conceptualization? Do they simply become useless with the patch? I'd say no, and it's a stance I feel comfortable taking. Conceptualization is simply a manifestation of imagination, and imagination is irrevocably wedded to creativity. And creativity is essential for insight at all levels. Einstein used them all to formulate both relativities. But we're all not Einstein, and we have to show that it also applies to us mere mortals. So let me give an example.
A capacitor is a set of two oppositely charged plates. Obviously they'll attract each other. This gives them potential energy, which for a very long time we've been taught to think of as energy that "balances the checkbook" for conservation. In EM we learned that the energy is in the form of the electric field between them, which carries it's own energy. This was the point where I asked the teacher "so is it field energy or potential energy?" She changed the subject. Later on a friend and I worked out that potential energy was field energy. Any sort of potential energy is actually real energy "trapped" in some kind of field. This has provided a great deal of insight into physics and provided a useful tool for understanding how certain problems interacted with each other. This was a realization that could not have happened without creativity and imagination. Even if you do argue that it could have, you would have to accept that you'd need such creativity to actually do anything with it.
That's my current position on the topic. Creativity in the form of conceptualization may not be necessary to 'get' what's going on in advanced physics, but it's hugely beneficial when you need to create new knowledge and models of reality. It's also necessary to craft the knowledge and models into practical creations for human use. That's why my love of conceptualization keeps me out of theoretical physics. I'd be much much happier doing applied.
The physical part is important. There are two ways to analyze anything in physics. The first way is with math. If you take the Poynting vector of an oscillating dipole you see that there is energy at infinity. Bam, radiation. But this doesn't tell you why you get radiation. In order to get that you'd have to notice that due to finite propagation time an oscillating dipole creates expanding "kinks" in the electric field. These kinks look like waves. Ergo radiation. This is conceptualizing the problem, recasting it in terms of what the world is actually doing.
Obviously mathematics is important in physics. You can't quantify anything without it, and without quantification you don't know whether your bridge will fall down or explode. What about qualification? Do we need conceptualization? Certainly it helps all physics before 1915 or so. Einstein built special relativity entirely off of gedanken, or conceptualization experiments. Things started getting a little tricky with quantum mechanics, though. It's really goddamned hard to imagine a probability wave, and the uncertainty principle is designed specifically to mess with our heads. Then you get deeper. Cosmology. Particle physics. String theory. The deeper you go the more the qualification becomes math. There is no physical reality happening, just math becoming macroscopics. Do isospin and hypercharge even exist? I have no idea.
I want to believe that conceptualization is still important. Certainly it becomes important in applied physics. If you can't imagine how the physics interacts with your intentions, then you fail as a technologist. I do not know how to rationalize it for pure physics. Surely you can get an understanding of what is going on without caring about it's physicality? But then we're no longer doing physics. We're doing reality math. That does sound pretty cool, but it also seems almost antithetical to the ideas of both reality and math.
There is one possibility to patch it up. We know from special and general relativity that there are things we know are real, but far to complicated for the human mind to comprehend. That's why we represent them entirely mathematically. This bothers me for other reasons that I will not go into now, because it is convention nonetheless. This allows for reality to be happening at the particle level while still requiring that the only qualitative analysis be mathematical. This is probably going to be the way it's going to go.
But what about the skills of conceptualization? Do they simply become useless with the patch? I'd say no, and it's a stance I feel comfortable taking. Conceptualization is simply a manifestation of imagination, and imagination is irrevocably wedded to creativity. And creativity is essential for insight at all levels. Einstein used them all to formulate both relativities. But we're all not Einstein, and we have to show that it also applies to us mere mortals. So let me give an example.
A capacitor is a set of two oppositely charged plates. Obviously they'll attract each other. This gives them potential energy, which for a very long time we've been taught to think of as energy that "balances the checkbook" for conservation. In EM we learned that the energy is in the form of the electric field between them, which carries it's own energy. This was the point where I asked the teacher "so is it field energy or potential energy?" She changed the subject. Later on a friend and I worked out that potential energy was field energy. Any sort of potential energy is actually real energy "trapped" in some kind of field. This has provided a great deal of insight into physics and provided a useful tool for understanding how certain problems interacted with each other. This was a realization that could not have happened without creativity and imagination. Even if you do argue that it could have, you would have to accept that you'd need such creativity to actually do anything with it.
That's my current position on the topic. Creativity in the form of conceptualization may not be necessary to 'get' what's going on in advanced physics, but it's hugely beneficial when you need to create new knowledge and models of reality. It's also necessary to craft the knowledge and models into practical creations for human use. That's why my love of conceptualization keeps me out of theoretical physics. I'd be much much happier doing applied.
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