Ten most important lessons from physics

Please don't run screaming from the room - no math will be used in this post!

My daughter is learning how to teach concepts from physics to elementary school students in the US. So, physics was my major in college, and Carl Sagan was my advisor in grad school for a while, so I should have learned something. I'm trying to evaluate what concepts have survived the test of time and actually are still helpful to me, many years later.

Anyway, here's my list of what I learned from physics:
The most important thing in solving a problem is figuring out where to stand to look at it. Once you figure out the right perspective, the rest is easy.

There is an elegant simplicity underneath much apparent complexity. Very simple rules can generate very complex outcomes. All the rules of physics fit on a 3x5 card -- the rest is implications.

You don't need to compute the details to be able to make strong statements about the outcome. Almost all of the internal complexity "drops out" of the equations if you stand back another few steps.

Paul Dirac, developer of quantum mechanics amid a very hostile field, said, paraphrasing: Life is intrisically beautiful. If an idea is beautiful, stick with it, even if the data argue against it, and even if you can't figure out the details yet -- you will. ( A dangerous rule to know when to apply.)

You can't decide whether something is beautiful or interesting based on whether your teaching assistant perceives either. Most of the time, "helpful" introductions to a field just get in the way. It's much easier to read Dirac's original work than it is to read someone else's interpretation and "simplification" of what it is Dirac was saying.

The mountain will not come to you - you need to go to the mountain. Physical problems have an intrinsic level of detail, beyond which they cannot be simplified. All efforts to wish the problems to be simpler, so you can avoid having to learn the relevant tools, are a waste of time. Bite the bullet, accept the delay, and go learn the right tool, then come back and ask that question again and it will be easy.

The worship of computational math is way over-rated. Techniques of thinking in terms of "symmetry", or rigorous qualitative logic are much more powerful than they are given credit for. (see item #3)

Knowing how to design something doesn't tell you whether you should actually build it or not. We live in a social world. "Technical" things have social ramifications that cannot be separated from them. This is true for bombs. It's also true for surprising things, like whether it would be a good idea to deliver cheap energy or abundant water to a society. ( The primary role of water is to flush your toxins into someone else's back yard, which ultimate turns out to be your own front yard, so you don't see the costs and just get the benefits ... for a while. Then when the bill arrives, it all looks different and you wish you hadn't done that.)

Things add up in surprising ways, and sometimes even very diute very distant stuff adds up to more than very strong local stuff, because there's just so much of the universe at a distance to multiply that small factor by. In the short run, electromagnetism is strong and gravity is weak. In the larger world, gravity wins in the end, and electromagnetism "goes away" in terms of determining outcomes. In the short run, "rock" beats "water" -- in the long run, "water" beats "rock". You can't assume how things add up by what's "obvious" locally.

and #10 -Quoting my favorite T.S. Eliot poem, Choruses from the Rock,

And the wind shall say: Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
and a thousand lost golf balls.

We build in vain unless the Lord build with us.
Can you keep the City that the Lord keeps not with you?
A thousand policemen directing the traffic
Cannot tell you why you come or where you go

The basic concept in #10, even for those who do not believe in some version of "God", is that the structure of the whole is not determined by the nature of the parts, but by the relationship between the parts. This is probably a restatement of the fundamental teaching of "systems thinking." As with my favorite M.C. Escher picture of the waterfall, getting the parts right doesn't mean the whole picture adds up to anything that's even sane, let alone valuable.

And, if the whole picture doesn't add up to something meaningful, it's a waste of time to "perfect" the pieces. The problem probably isn't with the pieces, but with the meaning, which needs to be addressed on its own level.

Images, health, wealth, success -- all are deeply nested fractal quantities, all vary with your planning horizon or prespective in space, time, and scale. (Ken Wilber would describe them as "holons".)

Getting things "right" in your local part of space, time, and scale tells you nothing, zero, zip about whether it is "right" in all those other worlds. Getting things right locally doesn't tell you anything about whether you have it right globally, or are just wasting your time. Both are important, but if you have to make a trade off, getting the global right is more important than getting local details right.

Details can be fixed later -- after you move the car off the train tracks.

More directly, because the global level(s) float on, but are largely independent of the lower local level(s), there is no reason to wait until you have one level perfectly understood before looking at the next higher level. Even perfect knowledge of atomic structure will tell you nothing at all about who will win the next election. You really can't reach "up" by going "down". Not even an infinite amount of work on one scale level will reveal to you what is going on at the next level up, or the one above that, etc.

But that is not to say that the next level up is even harder than infinity, but to say that the next level up is extremely simple again, but, well, um ... at a whole new level. So we stop trying to understand where every molecule goes, and just start looking at global properties, such as "pressure" and "temperature" that don't even have a meaning at the single molecule level.
It's not that it's hard to express, it's that it's impossible to express, but you don't need to.

So, when I open the faucet, why does water come out? This is a very deep question we can learn a huge amount by pondering. On a macro scale, we draw a picture of a distant water tank, higher than my house, and a half mile of pipes, and pressure gradients, and feel pleased that we have "explained" it. On a micro-scale, the molecules that were just inside the pipe nearest my faucet have no knowledge of "water tank" or "pipe" or "pressure". They only know "impact by this idiot molecule next to me" and "looks like more empty space over there."
Or that molecule may end up just sitting next to the pipe wall for the next 3 years, and some
other molecule comes out into my glass. On a local level, there is no "causality". On a global level, there is very clear "causality." In between lies madness, but we don't need to go there.
We can leap over the middle, skip the supercomputer figuring each molecules motion, which it turns out is not deterministic anyway. No computer can even conceptually ever tell us which
molecules will end up coming out of that pipe later today. But we don't care. We can leap
over the hard spot in the middle and just start doing reasoning at the next level up, in terms of "Pressure" and "temperature" and other new concepts that have zero, zip, absolutely no meaning to an individual molecule.

So, in a great many ways and senses, observers are embedded in their own world, and will never be able to directly perceive, or measure, whether they are measuring straight lines with straight rules, or crooked lines with crooked rulers. Everyone is right in his own eyes. So, some humility and trading of notes is a good idea before locking down your world model based upon your own observations, regardless how solid they appear to you.

As Karl Weick would say, you need to be "mindful", and look for contrary information, and be prepared to be surprised and discover that one of your favorite assumptions isn't actually true -- then, you may be able to find the simple and beautiful truth under all the clutter.

To me, that's what physics said.