by Jochen Szangolies
Modern physics in its full mathematical splendor introduces an array of unfamiliar concepts that daunt the initiate, and often even bewilder the pro (or is that just me?). A part of it is just that it’s a complex topic, and its objects of study are far removed from everyday experience: a quark or a black hole or a glueball is not something you’re likely to find on your desk. Well, maybe the latter, if you’ve been sloppy while crafting recently, but as so very often, physicists further confuse things by giving familiar names to unfamiliar concepts (spin, I’m looking your way).
But saying ‘it’s complicated’ is merely a fig leaf. Lots of things are complicated, and we manage to navigate them with ease. Many jobs involve reams of specialist knowledge, from plumbing to hedge-fond management, and even just navigating our webs of social relationships comes with considerable overhead. So what is it that makes physics special?
There is, of course, the already mentioned issue of the remoteness of its central concepts. Many of the complicated tasks we solve are so ingrained to us that we scarcely notice their complexity—the act of throwing a ball, or catching it out of thin air in flight, involves calculations that, in a realistic setting, stymied the efforts of robotics engineers for a long time. Likewise, the acquisition of language—even present-day Large Language Models (LLMs) still need to ‘read’ tens of trillions of words to acquire a degree of language fluency a human child can pick up just from what is spoken around them in their first couple of years. By comparison, an average reader would take something like 80.000 years of continuous reading time to ingest the text on which an LLM is trained!
These are tasks that, in some manner, are performed ‘natively’ by the human brain, without us noticing their complexity. Such tasks are sometimes classed as ‘System 1’-tasks in the dual-system psychology popularized by Daniel Kahnemann in his bestselling popular science book Thinking, Fast and Slow. In contrast, solving a mathematical equation or reasoning through a logic puzzle are step-by-step, explicit ‘System 2’-tasks you have to concentrate on—they’re not performed ‘by themselves’ the way catching a ball is. Read more »