SamAdams

You have, as has been pointed out, failed to understand the purpose of my comment. You will notice I never stated anything about this paper merely some basic guidelines to follow for determining if the paper is worth the effort to read, if one doesn't have significant knowledge of the field within which the paper was written.

I apologize if my purpose was not clear, but your comment is completely irrelevant and misguided.

EDIT: This is not an evaluation of the particular paper in question merely some general evaluation guidelines which are useful.

Drop dead easy way to evaluate the paper without reading it: (Not a standard to live by but it works)

1.) look up the authors if they are professors or experts great if its a nobody or a student ignore and discard or take with a grain of salt

2.) was the paper published and where (if on arxiv BEWARE it takes really no skill to get your work posted there anyone can do it)

Criteria: If paper written by respectable authorities or ones w... (read more)

"On one hand, Eliezer writes extremely good explanations. I'm learning from his style a lot."

Yeah, but they are rather verbose he tends to use 5 words when 2 would do.

"On the other hand, many people have pointed out that he doesn't publish novel rigorous results, which kinda detracts from the aura."

If you want to be in science this is a big issue unless your trying to pull a Wolfram and we all know how that turned out.

"On the third hand, he often finds and corrects non-obvious mathematical mistakes made by other people, including m... (read more)

Oh I get it. I would make the same point either way especially when the idea comes from a non math person. Whenever a non math person says this kind of thing it should make anyone who has done their due diligence cringe.

If you can't do the math so for the physics if partial differential equations are beyond you then you shouldn't be talking about physics. There are many fields where knowing the "drop-dead" math is not sufficient to qualify one to talk about it.

Now I know you will all vote me down, I am rocking the boat.

Ok, I have to be honest this entire idea makes me cringe, it seems a bit to much like a cheap get out of learning the math idea. Maybe I am biased because I actually am a mathematician but these kind of ideas I think are dangerous since you take away an important bar of admission to fields like physics. If you don't understand why the math is an important bar of admission look at the google groups physics group.

To be honest I think someone would be better off spending their time learning calculus at minimum then trying to read this kind of general overview... (read more)

Why re-invent the wheel this has already been done if I understand correctly for example in a bit of a more specific case "Fundamental Formulas of Physics".