Those two questions are completely unrelated. Popular physics books just aren’t trying to convey any physics. That is their handicap, not the math. Greene could teach you a lot of physics without using math, if he tried. But there’s no audience for such books.
Eliezer’s quantum physics sequence impressed me with its attempt to avoid math, but it seems to have failed pretty badly.
QED by Feynman is an awesome attempt to explain advanced physics without any maths. (But it was in origin a series of lectures, made into a book at a later time.)
One of the things that irked me about Penrose’s The Road to Reality is that he didn’t seem to make up his mind about who his audience was supposed to be, as he first painstakingly explains certain concepts that should be familiar to high-school seniors, and then he discusses topics that even graduate physics students (e.g. myself) would have difficulties with. But then I remembered that I aimed for exactly the same thing in the Wikipedia articles I edited, because if the whole article is aimed at a very specific audience i.e. physics sophomores (as a textbook would) then whoever is at a lower ‘level’ would understand little of it and whoever is at a higher level would find little they didn’t already know, whereas making the text more and more advanced as the article progresses makes each reader find something at the right level for them.
The point of the quantum mechanics sequence was the contrast between Rationality and Empiricism. By writing at least 2⁄3 of the text about quantum mechanics, Eliezer obscured this point in order to pick an unnecessary fight about the proper interpretation of particular experimental results in physics.
Even now, it is unclear whether he won that fight, and that counts as a failure because MWI vs. Copenhagen was supposed to be a case study of the larger point about the advantages of Rationality over Empiricism, not the main thing to be debated.
The one time he did math (interferometer example) he got phases wrong, probably as result of confusing phase of 180 with i , and who knows what other misunderstandings (wouldn’t bet money he understood phase at all). The worst sort of popularization is where the author doesn’t even know the topic first-hand (i.e. mathematically).
Even worse is this idiot idea above in this thread that you can evaluate someone else’s strength as rationalist or something by seeing if they agree with your opinion on a topic you very, very poorly understand, not even well enough to get any math right. Big chunk of ‘rationalism’ here is plain dilettantism, the worst form of. The belief you don’t need to know any subtleties to make opinions. The belief that those opinions for which you didn’t need to know subtleties do matter (they usually don’t). The EY has excuse with MWI—afaik he had personal loss at the time, and MWI is very comforting. Others here have no such excuse.
edit: i guess 5 people want an explanation what was wrong ? Another link. There’s several others. QM sequence is the very best example of what popularizations shouldn’t be like, or how a rational person shouldn’t think about physics. If you can’t get elementary shit right, shut up on philosophy you are not being rational, simply making mistakes. Purely Bayesian belief updates don’t matter if you update wrong things given evidence.
You and amy1987 responding seem to think that math is the same thing as formulas. While there is a lot that can be done without formulas, physics is impossible without math. For instance, to understand spin one needs to understand representation theory. amy1987 mentioned QED. Well, QED certainly does have math. It presents complex numbers and path integrals and the stationary phase approximation. Math is just thinking that is absolutely and completely precise.
ADDED: I forgot to take the statements I reference in their context: responding to James_Miller. He clearly used ‘math’ to mean what appears in math textbooks. This makes my criticism invalid. I’m sorry.
Those two questions are completely unrelated. Popular physics books just aren’t trying to convey any physics. That is their handicap, not the math. Greene could teach you a lot of physics without using math, if he tried. But there’s no audience for such books.
Eliezer’s quantum physics sequence impressed me with its attempt to avoid math, but it seems to have failed pretty badly.
QED by Feynman is an awesome attempt to explain advanced physics without any maths. (But it was in origin a series of lectures, made into a book at a later time.)
One of the things that irked me about Penrose’s The Road to Reality is that he didn’t seem to make up his mind about who his audience was supposed to be, as he first painstakingly explains certain concepts that should be familiar to high-school seniors, and then he discusses topics that even graduate physics students (e.g. myself) would have difficulties with. But then I remembered that I aimed for exactly the same thing in the Wikipedia articles I edited, because if the whole article is aimed at a very specific audience i.e. physics sophomores (as a textbook would) then whoever is at a lower ‘level’ would understand little of it and whoever is at a higher level would find little they didn’t already know, whereas making the text more and more advanced as the article progresses makes each reader find something at the right level for them.
Why?
The point of the quantum mechanics sequence was the contrast between Rationality and Empiricism. By writing at least 2⁄3 of the text about quantum mechanics, Eliezer obscured this point in order to pick an unnecessary fight about the proper interpretation of particular experimental results in physics.
Even now, it is unclear whether he won that fight, and that counts as a failure because MWI vs. Copenhagen was supposed to be a case study of the larger point about the advantages of Rationality over Empiricism, not the main thing to be debated.
The one time he did math (interferometer example) he got phases wrong, probably as result of confusing phase of 180 with i , and who knows what other misunderstandings (wouldn’t bet money he understood phase at all). The worst sort of popularization is where the author doesn’t even know the topic first-hand (i.e. mathematically).
Even worse is this idiot idea above in this thread that you can evaluate someone else’s strength as rationalist or something by seeing if they agree with your opinion on a topic you very, very poorly understand, not even well enough to get any math right. Big chunk of ‘rationalism’ here is plain dilettantism, the worst form of. The belief you don’t need to know any subtleties to make opinions. The belief that those opinions for which you didn’t need to know subtleties do matter (they usually don’t). The EY has excuse with MWI—afaik he had personal loss at the time, and MWI is very comforting. Others here have no such excuse.
edit: i guess 5 people want an explanation what was wrong ? Another link. There’s several others. QM sequence is the very best example of what popularizations shouldn’t be like, or how a rational person shouldn’t think about physics. If you can’t get elementary shit right, shut up on philosophy you are not being rational, simply making mistakes. Purely Bayesian belief updates don’t matter if you update wrong things given evidence.
You and amy1987 responding seem to think that math is the same thing as formulas. While there is a lot that can be done without formulas, physics is impossible without math. For instance, to understand spin one needs to understand representation theory. amy1987 mentioned QED. Well, QED certainly does have math. It presents complex numbers and path integrals and the stationary phase approximation. Math is just thinking that is absolutely and completely precise.
ADDED: I forgot to take the statements I reference in their context: responding to James_Miller. He clearly used ‘math’ to mean what appears in math textbooks. This makes my criticism invalid. I’m sorry.
You make several contradictory claims and I disagree with all of them.
Explain.
From the context, I guess that was not what James_Miller meant.