{"id":305,"date":"2008-01-23T20:52:10","date_gmt":"2008-01-24T00:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=305"},"modified":"2008-01-23T20:52:10","modified_gmt":"2008-01-24T00:52:10","slug":"science-the-toroidal-pyramid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=305","title":{"rendered":"Science: the toroidal pyramid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chad Orzel gripes<\/a> about this month’s Scientific American<\/span> special issue on “The Future of Physics”<\/a> — which is actually extremely good, but which turns out to be exclusively about the future of high-energy particle physics. Not surprisingly, the commenters on Chad’s blog reignite the ancient debate about which science is more fundamental than which other one, and whether all sciences besides particle physics are stamp collecting.<\/p>\n

I started writing a comment myself, but then I realized I hadn’t posted anything to my own<\/span> blog in quite some time, so being nothing if not opportunistic, I decided to put it here instead.<\/p>\n

To me, one of the most delicious things about computer science is the way it turns the traditional “pyramid of sciences” on its head. We all know, of course, that math and logic are more fundamental than particle physics (even particle physicists themselves will, if pressed, grudgingly admit as much), and that particle physics is in turn more fundamental than condensed-matter physics, which is more fundamental than chemistry, which is more fundamental than biology, which is more fundamental than psychology, anthropology, and so on, which still<\/em> are more fundamental than grubby engineering fields like, say, computer science … but then you find out that computer science actually has as strong a claim as math to be the substrate beneath<\/span> physics, that in a certain sense computer science is<\/span> math, and that until you understand what kinds of machines the laws of physics do and don’t allow, you haven’t really understood the laws themselves … and the whole hierarchy of fundamental-ness gets twisted into a circle and revealed as the bad nerd joke that it always was.<\/p>\n

That was a longer sentence than I intended.<\/p>\n

Note (Jan. 25):<\/strong><\/font> From now on, all comments asking what I think of the movie “Teeth” will be instantly deleted. I’m sick of the general topic, and regret having ever brought it up. Thank you for your understanding.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chad Orzel gripes about this month’s Scientific American special issue on “The Future of Physics” — which is actually extremely good, but which turns out to be exclusively about the future of high-energy particle physics. Not surprisingly, the commenters on Chad’s blog reignite the ancient debate about which science is more fundamental than which other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-csphysics-deathmatch","category-mirrored-on-csail-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}