I am rather surprised that I have received more than one positive response to the rant which I posted in my last entry here. At this point I need to clarify just where I stand in relation to the content of the rant. The attitude, ideas, and lamentations which I expressed in "Losing the Cultural War" come from my own cultural and family heritage. This is what I grew up with. But I don't agree with all of it, only some of it. Most people don't agree with everything they grew up with.

My personal ideas about art and culture are more modest, simpler, and less lofty. I quote here from one of my correspondents, a Friendly Composer. (Just as I have Friendly Scientists and Mathematicians, I also have Friendly Composers, Writers, and Artists.) He said the following after reading my "culture war" essay:

"… I find myself all the time worrying less and less about huge cultural questions, and just focusing in more on my doing my craft and work as best I can.… I'm most interested in simply getting down to it and writing pieces, promoting them, publishing and performing, etc."

I feel the same way about my art. I would rather be considered a simple-minded craftsman who makes art to order for a client and gets paid for it, than have myself stuck in the stance of the intellectual who does less art (out of despair) and spends more time denouncing the cultural scene.

Now I hope I can get back to physics, which is as important to me as art.

Formula

Chapter 4, in the Barron's book, has a lot of material in it. It's got Newton's laws, impulse, momentum, conservation of momentum, angular momentum, Kepler's laws, Newton's law of universal gravity, the inverse-square law of gravity, and more. All of these essentials are expressed in mathematical formulas. Once they are derived, they are just there and you can plug in what numbers you have to solve for the quantity you don't have.

Sixteenth and seventeenth-century scientists toiled over data gathered with primitive (by our standards) observation equipment to find these laws. Only historians of science bother with the whole story of how the laws were formulated. For the rest of us physics students, you just use the formulas. An entire era of human history stands behind Newton's f = ma, but I'm using it to solve high-school-level problems.

When I was in academic humanities, the word "formula" or "formulaic" had only BAD significance. It was what you were never supposed to do when you were writing or creating art. Formula was mundane, repetitive, uncreative, and unoriginal, guaranteed to cause banal and lousy art. If a critic said that some piece of art followed a formula, that was a bad review. I have already said in a previous post how "generalization" was also regarded as bad. You were supposed to approach everything as if it were the first time each time, without any preconceptions.

But in science, it's the opposite. The goal (as one of my Friendly Scientists enthusiastically said to me) is to reduce a phenomenon to as simple an example as possible, and find a general formula which explains it. The complexity can come later.

As a border-crossing humanist (ex-humanist? transhumanist?) I feel somewhat guilty that I am learning and using so many formulas without creating them anew each time. "Learning science is more than just memorizing formulas," the modern teacher might say. But I think that in my case this is a mis-application of my old humanist ways to my new scientific endeavor. The formulas are what make the starry wheels of the universe turn, and I am glad that I don't have to re-invent those wheels each time I move them.

Posted at 3:17 am | link