Why? Because math is hard, and doesn’t pander to the “layman”.

Take out the contributions of mathematicians and neither physics nor economics would have much left but talk.

” They aren’t called branes, they are called submanifolds–and we in differential geometry have been exploring their properties for more than a century.”

Why? Because math is hard, and doesn’t pander to the “layman”.

Take out the contributions of mathematicians and neither physics nor economics would have much left but talk.

” They aren’t called branes, they are called submanifolds–and we in differential geometry have been exploring their properties for more than a century.”

The problem of (or maybe I should say my problem with) economic theory is in its level of abstraction – so many assumptions are made that the final theories no longer resemble the world they are supposed to represent. By the time you finish setting up the classic minimum wage model you’ve assumed away important things like class, gender, age and power while simultaneously assuming that the workforce is liquid enough and that wages are dynamic enough for the market clearing process to occur. This simply doesn’t reflect the world that we live in. The sophistication required to refute this model (in economic terms) is generally not possessed by the 1st year econ students it is taught to, so this type of thought process becomes part of their ‘intuition’, and sadly it affects their life choices and politics in the future which in turn affects human life as a whole.

I could rant on this for hours, but more to the point: members of the public generally don’t have the ability to ‘raise the bar’ on physicists because they set it so high on themselves to begin with. Economists on the other hand have buried their bar in the sand, so anybody who feels like digging can get to it.

This is the effect of the lack of controlled experiments I mentioned earlier. You’ll notice that ever economic prediction says “other things being equal.” Well, other things being equal, a minimum wage does reduce employment. But economics don’t get to hold other things equal: economic events happen all the time, simultaneously, to different groups of people, with different laws in place, and a multitude of other factors that very. Even valid deductions are open to attack because economists can’t control these other factors. ["Minimum wage may have reduced employment there, but won't here." Can't really rerun history twice on the same people to prove your case.]

I don’t think there’s a need to point out how these factors don’t apply to many other area. Especially economics.

Saying that a minimum wage increases unemployment is based on multiple heroic assumptions (infinite this, zero that) while assuming away any contrary evidence. An idea this weak would never survive centuries in the hard sciences; the reason physicists are given a ‘pass’ is that the physics community has demonstrated its ability to self-monitor and discard bad or unrealistic ideas. The reason economists have their ideas attacked is that they deserve it.

Farhi hopes that something (anything, please!) will be found that is not currently predicted by the Standard Model. Otherwise High-energy particle physics in its current form, accurate to 10 decimal places, will be almost completely explained.

What’s wrong with the Standard Model being correct? It would appear that 10 decimal places accuracy is sufficient to indicate a theory correct and complete.

High-energy particle physicists are worried that, should the LHC prove to be a $6B boondoggle contributing little or nothing to knowledge, they will be unable to get future funding and will face future unemployment. Farhi admits he is hedging his bets by doing side research in quantum computing (that’s why he’s at Google).

I hope the LHC finds nothing new. Then research money could be redirected from high-energy particle physics to more productive areas of physics and the other sciences.