#scientificunderstanding — Public Fediverse posts

🧵 Post 3 / 3 — Why This Matters
🌀 Why this feels new (but isn’t wrong)
Physics didn’t get this wrong — the mathematics works beautifully.
But often we stop at abstraction because it’s sufficient for calculation, even when mechanical intuition still exists underneath.
Sometimes understanding doesn’t come from more abstraction,
but from slowing down and examining constraints we already know.
A childhood toy just made those constraints visible again.
🌀
#FromFirstPrinciples #ScientificUnderstanding #LearningNeverStops
#EverydayPhysics #ChemistryIsPhysics

This past year I have been pondering what is ‘#ScientificUnderstanding’. Stumbled on this quote by #LordKelvin where ‘understanding’ is connected to the ability to build causal #models “It seems to me that the test of ‘Do we or not understand a particular subject in physics?’ is, ‘Can we make a mechanical model of it?’ " https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-005-5000-4

This past year I have been pondering what is ‘#ScientificUnderstanding’. Stumbled on this quote by #LordKelvin where ‘understanding’ is connected to the ability to build causal #models “It seems to me that the test of ‘Do we or not understand a particular subject in physics?’ is, ‘Can we make a mechanical model of it?’ " https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-005-5000-4