branches:phenomenology
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branches:phenomenology [2017/09/10 16:49] jakobadmin [Student] |
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| ====== Phenomenology ====== | ====== Phenomenology ====== | ||
| - | <tabbox Why is it interesting?> | ||
| - | <tabbox Layman> | + | |
| + | <tabbox Intuitive> | ||
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| This is how phenomenology works: | This is how phenomenology works: | ||
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| + | Technically, I still had to choose between being a theorist or an experimentalist, but for me, this wasn’t much of a choice.The essence of theoretical physics is the attempt to look at the universe, and then men-tally apprehend its structure. If you are right, you emulate Newton and Einstein: You find one of the Ten Commandments.You write down a simple set of laws that, plucked from nowhere, miraculously describes and predicts how God’s world works.This was the struggle to which I aspired. Anything else would have been a compromise that I was not prepared to make. | ||
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| + | Even within theoretical particle physics there are further refinements.Pure theory is the search for abstract laws, for a formulation of the divine commandments that rule the world. But, for every Moses descending from the mountain with a valid new law, there are countless well-intentioned prophets whose proposed laws turn out to be wrong. So how does one tell when a theory is right? | ||
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| + | Beauty, even mathematical beauty, is not enough. Physicists must test a new theory by elaborating the ways in which it manifests itself in the world. Physicists who do so-called phenomenology work out the detailed and observable consequences of a theory, providing the practical link between principles and experiment, between mind and matter. Phenomenologists elaborate the theory; they create heuristic approximations to engineer the theory into a pragmatic tool; they propose experiments to validate or refute a theory, using the theory itself to compute the expected results. Phenomenologists deal a little more with the ripples on the surface and a little less with the laws beneath it. | ||
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| + | Though I wanted to do pure theory, I ultimately ended up spending much of my life in physics as a phenomenologist. Over the long run,this stood me in very good stead.When I moved to Wall Street, I found quantitative finance to resemble phenomenology much more than it resembled pure theory. Quantitative finance is concerned with the techniques that people use to value financial contracts and, given the fluctuations of the human psyche, it is a pragmatic study of surfaces rather than a principled study of depths. Physics, in contrast, is concerned with God’s canons, which seem to be more easily captured in the simple broad statements that characterize profound physical laws. | ||
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| At the University of Pennsylvania, now without a PhD advisor, I had to take my own road, and so I began to look for something new to work on. I had spent most my graduate student years working on high-energy phenomenology, comparing other people’s theories with other people’s experiments. It was useful and interesting, but not as visionary as the physics I had imagined doing.Trying to be ambitious, I began to study the so-called Lee model, an idealized and therefore analytically soluble theory of particle interactions that was the subject of an early paper by T. D. himself. I hoped that it would form the basis for a deeper under-standing of quark forces. I spent most of my first semester at Penn trying vainly to master the field. But I found it difficult to concentrate; I was restless from the lack of friends, tense from the strains of a geographically divided marital life, and tired from all the back-and-forth driving—I would go to New York on Friday nights and return to Philadelphia early on Monday mornings. Some weekends I was just too weary to make the trip and remained alone in Philadelphia, killing time and feeling half-resentful. | At the University of Pennsylvania, now without a PhD advisor, I had to take my own road, and so I began to look for something new to work on. I had spent most my graduate student years working on high-energy phenomenology, comparing other people’s theories with other people’s experiments. It was useful and interesting, but not as visionary as the physics I had imagined doing.Trying to be ambitious, I began to study the so-called Lee model, an idealized and therefore analytically soluble theory of particle interactions that was the subject of an early paper by T. D. himself. I hoped that it would form the basis for a deeper under-standing of quark forces. I spent most of my first semester at Penn trying vainly to master the field. But I found it difficult to concentrate; I was restless from the lack of friends, tense from the strains of a geographically divided marital life, and tired from all the back-and-forth driving—I would go to New York on Friday nights and return to Philadelphia early on Monday mornings. Some weekends I was just too weary to make the trip and remained alone in Philadelphia, killing time and feeling half-resentful. | ||
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| </blockquote> | </blockquote> | ||
| - | <tabbox Researcher> | + | <tabbox Abstract> |
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| </note> | </note> | ||
| - | --> Common Question 1# | + | <tabbox Why is it interesting?> |
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| - | --> Common Question 2# | + | |
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| - | <tabbox Examples> | + | |
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| - | --> Example1# | + | |
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| - | --> Example2:# | + | |
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| - | <tabbox History> | + | |
| </tabbox> | </tabbox> | ||
branches/phenomenology.txt · Last modified: 2020/03/20 19:42 by tortuga
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