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Douglas_Knight comments on What attracts smart and curious young people to physics? Should this be encouraged? - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: VipulNaik 13 March 2014 05:22PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 14 March 2014 01:03:38PM 2 points [-]

Not much of an undergraduate physics degree is honest experimental testing for fundamental models against reality. Possibly the answer is none except at good schools, but even at good schools the amount in other fields is zero. But a large part of the physics curriculum is about understanding the limits of approximations, testing them against mathematical models that are assumed to be true.

Comment author: Baughn 14 March 2014 02:33:48PM *  1 point [-]

I would say "Except for Computer Science", where testing theories is practically half your job. There are probably other exceptions, but that's the one I'm familiar with.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 14 March 2014 03:40:25PM 0 points [-]

CS teaches a very different skill and it teaches it very badly.

Comment author: ChristianKl 14 March 2014 01:36:38PM 0 points [-]

I think bioinformatics provides a better introduction to science. We did experiments that produces results that didn't match the book results and saw how hard it is to get experiments to reproduce.

We also had more statistics classes the the average physics course.