Scientific Parables
⚠️Post under construction: please return again another day⚠️
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” - Possibly misattributed to Albert Einstein.
Unfortunately I’m not able to embed the video directly, but I would love to highlight this point by Prof Eric Laithwaite, which my poor wife knows I quote far too often. It’s a highly instructive point and I’m glad that someone in Prof Laithwaite’s position formalised this as not only a valid way of thinking but an encouraged one. Sometimes I fear that the tendency in scientific communication is to, as (Michael Rosen)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Rosen] beautifully puts it, bamboozle and confuzle the audience. The conditions that lead to this mindset are perhaps the subject for another discussion, but on this page I’d like to outline my thoughts on scientific teaching in STEM.
TODO: the bird, circular logic and the clock explanation
As a prelude to this reflection I’d like to share a favourite video of mine:
I’m sure everyone can relate to the blank feeling when something is explained to you for the first time. Perhaps for many subjects this is how it stays in your mind forever, just a shaky concept that you hope you never have to explain to somebody in simple terms. Perhaps you can remember times when a long-misunderstood concept finally clicked, perhaps just because of one particular way that somebody put it. It might not have been particularly nuanced or insightful, but whatever it was, the understanding is suddenly a lot clearer. And you wonder why it really took you so long it it really is so simple. It feels as though all it takes to understand it was just that one explanation who put it the right way. I think if we feel negative about that then we might be forgetting about the fallacy of the Straw that broke the camel’s back; all of that misunderstanding might have been a prerequisite for understanding it at that time. And there is also the idea that the way you understood it might be different than how somebody else’s brain works. While my post on Scientific Parables contains more about this, …
I must say until recently it eluded me to think how a clock pendulum actually works. Why don’t they work on ships in the olden days? Simple harmonic motion we learned at school didn’t have damliing and just ran forever. For the damped case, for whatever reason this never really would land with me. But since undertaking this course (LINK) this has improved significantly.
As my maths teacher used to say: When it’s tricky draw a piccy
Intuiitively this is what would happen, and seeing it animated makes more sense than just the line plot. A major breakthrough in my understanding was actually putting to bed the swing analogy because I feel that this had been getting in the way somewhat. In this case, the foce can only be applied at the natural frequency of the spring, but in the model the force can be applied anywhere.
Opening the lid off this idea has given me a fresh perspective on dynamical systems modelling. In what other systems we can reduce the model to an inertia component, damping, restoring force and applied force. I wonder if understnading this takes geophysical fluid dynamics down a notch especially with regards to coriolis. Can we see other models through this lens to make them less scary? As a first port of call I decided to return to my beloved test bed, the Double Gyre.