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Yep, Richard Dawkins said something on Twitter again.
Physics is a genuinely deep and difficult subject. Physicists struggle honestly to explain it in simple language.
Physics Envy: Subjects lacking the genuine depth and difficulty of physics invent obscure language to try to make it sound harder than it is
Dawkin’s Law of Conservation of Obscurity: Obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity.
What really struck me was that he was wrong in two profound ways.
Physics is actually very shallow and easy. General Relativity can be boiled down to the following axioms:
- Relativity: All things obey the same rules, no matter when or where you’re looking from. As a consequence, conservation laws exist (thank you, Emmy Noether)
- Locality: To get from A to B, you have to pass through all points between A and B.
- Limits: Light has a fixed speed limit.
- Matter and energy: they exist.
It’s actually simpler than Newtonian Mechanics, which failed when you were in an accelerating reference frame and required the addition of fictitious forces to handle that case. The theory is so simple that you can easily write the entire thing on a single line:
Quantum Mechanics is a bit more complex, mainly because you’re dealing with additional dimensions like “spin” and “charge,” but the math amounts to little more than “this is how a wavefunction evolves over time.” You still wind up with simple axioms like “matter/energy is quantized” and “information is conserved.” Sean Carrol could summarize all of everyday physics in two lines:
So why do we think physics is so complicated? Part of comes from the environment of those theories; General Relativity, for instance, lives within Reimann geometry and tensors, so behind that T tensor are a whole load of other assumptions like “space can curve.” Part of it comes from sheer numbers; solving a simple single-atom system is child’s play, compared to solving one with a trillion trillion atoms.
But part of it comes from the collision between our everyday intuitions and these core assumptions. We’ve never noticed the time slowdown that comes with increased velocity implied by General Relativity because we never move fast enough to spot it. Decades of experience have led us to form misleading conclusions like “time is constant” or “matter does not behave like waves,” so when those assertions are contradicted we have a tough time unlearning what we’ve learned. To a non-physicist like Dawkins, then, physics seems much more difficult than it actually is.
This leads to the second profound wrongness: Unlike physics, biology is genuinely difficult. Even something as simple as locating body parts requires memorizing unusual terms, and the complexity of living things requires a rich but rather opaque language.
- Hapaloid: “The number of chromosomes in a gamete of an organism.”
- Hypertonic solution: “A solution that has higher osmotic pressure (or has more solutes) than another solution to which it is compared.”
- Heterozygous: “Of, or pertaining to an individual (or a condition in a cell or an organism) containing two different alleles for a particular trait.”
You must invent new terms to efficiently describe complex concepts, and by virtue of being new and complex these terms will come across as “obscure” to a lay person. They may even shift and be redefined over time, as new information comes in. Compare the above to some feminist terms:
- Rape Culture: “the cloud of myths about sexual assault that exist within [a] society, which make it easier to excuse that crime and/or tougher for victims to recover or seek justice.“
- Patriarchy: “a term for societies in which male is the favored gender, and in which men hold power, dominion and privilege.”
- Sexualized Objectification: “The viewing of people solely as de-personalized objects of desire instead of as individuals with complex personalities and desires/plans of their own.”
If anything, the more obscure the language used to describe a topic, the more complex that subject must be. Dawkins is dead-wrong here, too.
Dawkins is also a biologist. He should be acutely aware that biology is full of obscure terms, and yet is a richly complicated subject. So either:
- Richard Dawkins has such a bee in his bonnet over the social sciences that he can’t spot a blatant contradiction in front of his face, or
- Richard Dawkins is no longer a biologist, and doesn’t realize he’s contradicting himself.
If you glance at his CV, you find an interesting shift starting around 1990; he stopped doing academic work and shifted over to being a cheerleader for science. That’s vital work, but it’s also divorced from the academic study of biology. Over the decades, it’s possible he’s lost his specialist knowledge and become a talking head; look carefully at this dissection of the laryngeal nerve, and note who’s dishing out the jargon and who’s giving the high-level picture.
You could argue that Richard Dawkins is no longer a biologist. I’m not quite at that stage myself, but the evidence is suggestive.
SINMANTYX 
HJ:
You do make a few good points, although you periodically (if not frequently) go off half-cocked, and wind up shooting yourself in the feet. In particular, I rather doubt that Dawkins was arguing that biology was not “genuinely difficult”. He only said, that I can see, “academic subjects” and in which the relevant definition for “academic” would appear to be either “not of practical relevance; of only theoretical interest” or maybe “of or relating to education and scholarship”. For examples, in either case, “Women’s Studies”, “The Patriarchy”, and “Rape Culture”.
But, somewhat in passing, any plan to actually respond to my last comment on your “Peanut Butter & Dark Chocolate” thread?
It was on my to-do list today, but I got inspired to write this blog post and a YouTube comment instead. I’ll get to your comment in a bit.
But holy shit, you commented within twenty minutes of me firing up that blog post! Back to stalking me again, I see.
The marvels of the Internet. You post something – a new topic or a comment to an old one, WordPress immediately sends me an e-mail message – probably within seconds, I check my mail periodically – voila, mirabile dictu, HJ has posted something new. Some things I comment on, some aren’t of much interest, or I don’t have the time.
You may wish to reflect on Occam’s Razor, and try to keep your suspicions and your pareidolia if not your paranoia in check.
But I look forward to your comment in the other thread.
I’m so old; I remember when free will existed. Now people are controlled by electronic notifications that forced them to request them.
Funny old world, innit ?
Most matters worth caring about are “deep and difficult” if we examine them closely enough. To keep ourselves honest in reasoning about such matters we should aspire to avoid needless obscurity. Bad ideas often find refuge in reasoning that is too opaque to bear examination.
I expect that free will still exists. Just that people haven’t yet come up with an adequate definition. Which is problematic since many insist, rather dogmatically, that because much of “reality” is seemingly governed by the “laws” of physics that means individuals have no autonomy or agency. Kind of an “either-or” situation for them when a more reasonable position seems to be that we have “degrees of freedom” (1), not an absolute and all-encompassing measure of it.
But less “controlled by electronic notifications” than being obliged, to some extent, to deal with the consequences of one’s prior choices. “When you’re up to your ass in alligators it’s important to remember that you did set out to drain the swamp.”
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1) “_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_freedom”;