Now granted, it's not like I'm going to have some simple equation that allows me to perform these calculations. My understanding is that the mathematics for handling these types of calculations for real world problems is immensely complex and inevitably requires a lot of computer power if you want to do something useful with the concepts. That's fine. Ultimately, what really turns me on is that I'm getting a better understanding of how the world really works from first principles. Obviously, that window into the "real reality" is still very fuzzy and very small, but it's still a window that allows occasional glimpses of the deeper "truth" that we generally don't perceive as we go about our daily lives.
I also think that Professor Faller's lecturing style jives pretty well with my style of learning. The accent and the bad handwriting were tough the first few days, but adaptation to that has been pretty quick. A big help was learning that characters that look like upside-down v's are actually the number 1. I also like how he's easily able to work interesting anecdotes about material into the lecture, usually in response to questions. For example, today he briefly touched on the concept of what are called "periodic boundary conditions." I'm not going to bore you with a further explanation of what those are, but suffice it to say I had encountered them once before while visiting RPI earlier this year. This created an interesting quandary in my head which I'll explain later. To resolve this quandary I asked Professor Faller how recent of a technique "PBC's" are. Apparently they're fairly recent, in that they were definitely used by Edward Teller to solve some problems in the 50's and were also probably used by a guy named H. Ising in the 20's. So yeah, I like that I can ask the Professor a question like that in class and get an interesting answer that involves Edward Teller or in an earlier case, Laplace's Demon. I'm not really sure how exactly to describe why this is different and cool, but it genuinely is. Even though he tends to focus on computer simulations (which I've never thought of as interesting) I'm probably going to talk to Professor Faller about his research.
Now here's the skinny about the earlier mention of PBC's and RPI. I was talking to Suzanne on the phone last night, and the issue of bullshit came up. My experiences with Neah Power and the WTC have generally made me a more cynical person and drove me to the conclusion that there are a lot of people out there that are "full of shit." So, one interesting question I'm going to be answering while I get my PhD is "are the proportion of people in academia that are full of shit greater, less than or equal to the proportion of people in corporate-world and government-world?" The answer to this question will probably do a lot in determining what type of positions I apply for when I'm almost done with my PhD.
What was interesting about my experience with "PBC's" at RPI was that I had been led to believe that the use of "PBC's" was in some way very new and had in fact been invented by the professor that was using them in one of his molecular simulations. It was never directly stated that the professor "invented" them, but it was strongly implied that using them in a molecular simulation was somehow very novel and non-obvious. In my brain, that means "invented". Too bad it was neither. Apparently, using PBC's is very very common and as Professor Faller stated, nearly 99% of these types of problems assume them. So, I get the impression that the grad student I was talking to was trying to impress me by correctly guessing that I didn't know what PBC's were and then implying that his Research Advisor had invented them. In other words, this guy was probably "full of shit."
So, I guess I need to start keeping a tally of number of graduate students and professors met, and the number that bullshit excessively.
3 comments:
I used PCBs in both undergrad & grad school so I say your BS detector seems to be in working order.
BTW, the use of the phrase "it follows from first principles" is an excellent way to make other engineers quit pestering you for a real answer in a meeting. They'll almost always shut up in order to keep from looking stupid. That piece of advice was given to me by an old school EE.
as a matter of subjective relevance, in high school my first dnd friend, and a committed bullshit artist gave me brief lecture on the principles of Laplace's Demon, though he either wasn't paying enough attention, or didn't have the mental fortitude to remember the detail of the name. that or the illustrious english teacher who introduced the concept didn't know or remember himself. thus, when calculating your bullshit ratio, i would recommend considering the permutation of how much of it has simply rolled down hill
Before this week, I had only encountered Laplace's Demon in two other places. In neither case was I armed with a weapon that was both magical and good aligned. The first time, it was in my junior year of high school in my "Christian Apologetics" class. It was used in some kind of hokey "proof" of the existence of god. I hardly remember it anymore, other than that it really didn't seem like much of a proof. The other time was in my philosophy class that I took at Oregon State. I think it was again related to the god question.
Sort of odd to see it used in a class on Statistical Thermodynamics. Although, it was again used to infer a god-like state of knowledge.
Professor Faller said, "If you were able to know all of the microstates of a system at time t, for example The Demon, you would be able to perfectly predict the behavior of the system at all times after that."
But really, that's just what Laplace's Demon is. A hypothetical omniscient, omnipresent being with no ability to directly impact the world. You know, sorta like the gods in my new campaign world. :)
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