Re: But why an elliptical orbit
- From: tony_flanders@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 12 Oct 2005 13:48:58 -0700
lal_truckee wrote:
> I'm tired of people who are proud of being mathematically illiterate, as
> if it's a badge of their social sophistication ... we have people asking for
> mathematics to be translated to a language (english) that doesn't have
> the appropriate words ...
Well, yes and no. First of all, nobody should be proud of ignorance
of any kind. English majors shouldn't be proud that they don't know
calculus, and math majors shouldn't be proud that they haven't can't
understand Shakespeare. Christians shouldn't be proud that they know
nothing about the Upanishads, and Communists shouldn't be proud that
they haven't read Mein Kampf.
Having said that, you have to recognize that nobody can know
everything.
In fact, there's a body of knowledge that is generally recognized as
what all well-educated people *ought* to know, and nobody can even
know that -- not in satisfactory detail, anyway. You have to pick
and chose.
I really do think that everybody -- except the small but non-trivial
minority who aren't capable of it -- ought to have some grasp of
arithmetic, algebra, probability, and statistics. The kind of
math you need to read a newspaper critically, to see through the
lies of the "experts." I don't think that everybody ought to know
enough math to derive Kepler's laws from Newton's laws.
But Kepler's laws are so essential, you say. OK, fine. So are
Einstein's laws. And so is quantum theory, and all the math you
know to *really* understand what the Higgs boson is, why people
are looking for it, and what the implications of finding or
failing to find it would be. After all, *nothing* is more
fundamental than that!
I'll be the first to admit that *I* don't understand relativistic
quantum mechanics -- not even close! A long time ago, I sat down
and evaluated how much I cared about that fact. I concluded that
I am one of the small fraction of the population who actually
*could* understand it if it were a sufficiently high priority.
I'm quite sure that most people are physically incapable of
plowing through that much math, just as I could never run a
5-minute mile no matter how hard I trained. But I have a
pretty good aptitude for mathematics; all I would need would
be 40 hours a week for a decade or so. Is it worth it to me?
No. The benefits from the work would be very, very large, but
the price would be even larger. I would rather spend that
decade learning about history and literature, thank you.
I know that *I* can't explain in plain English why Kepler's
laws follow from Newton's. But I'm not proud of that fact.
- Tony Flanders
.
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