Yes, "you have to be able to do the math," but...

Larry tells Clive, in regard to Clive’s not being sufficiently prepared to do the math on the mid-term and thus his flunking the mid-term, that the physics is really contained in the math and the examples like Shrödinger’s cat are “fables” to help with understanding the math.

It’s certainly true, as I am well aware, that one has to jump through the mathematical hoops as presented by physics professors in assignments and on exams. This is the Dictatorship of the Professariat, and nowhere in academia is it more pronounced than in physics. But if the professor doesn’t do his part in preparing the students for exams, and the student doesn’t do his or her part in preparing (which, I suggest, means in physics and math that you should work on the assignments and study for exams with one other person from your class—don’t try to go it alone), then the result is what Clive experiences in the movie.

I love math and I love physics, but I love straightforward writing even more, and I’m here to tell you that badly written textbooks are another factor that must be somehow compensated for if one is to survive in the standard physics curriculum. (One like myself, I mean, not one like an average physics brainiac.) Fortunately there are a few good textbooks out there. Griffiths’ quantum mechanics text and his electrodynamics text are good ones at the upper undergraduate level. Unfortunately, the standard texts used in most of the graduate classes I’ve taken are poorly written and focus less on physics than on, yes, jumping through mathematical hoops. And also on what seem more like engineering problems than physics problems (“problems” means homework assignment problems).

The math part of physics is indeed where the real physics is. It is necessary to learn it to some extent—enough to survive the Dictatorship of the Professariat—but really the math is not sufficient for understanding the physics. Physicists make progress—or at least until 60 years ago or so, made progress—by having intuitive insights that are translatable into math but are not exclusively mathematical.

One of the great physics expositors of the early-to-mid 20th century was the British astronomer-philosopher Arthur Eddington (that would be Sir Arthur Eddington for you anglophiles). He gave a series of lectures in 1938 at Cambridge University that were transcribed and published in 1939 as a book called The Philosophy of Physical Science. In the Ann Arbor paperback edition (U. of Michigan Press, 1958), you can find near the bottom of page 55 a sort of summation of Eddington’s complaint that physicists routinely ignore the epistemological aspect of their pursuit while over-emphasizing the math:

This vagueness and inconsistency of the attitude of most physicists is largely due to a tendency to treat the mathematical development of a theory as the only part which deserves serious attention. But in physics everything depends on the insight with which the ideas are handled before they reach the mathematical stage.

So there, all ye physics dictators.  The ideas are antecedent to the math-o-matics.  Well, most of the time. 

 

And about Niels Bohr and those 3 rabbis, it was actually three stories told by one rabbi.  Here's what H.B Gellat says about it on the Institute of Noetic Sciences webpage (www.shiftinaction.com/node/7179), posted as The Certainty of Uncertainty: Beware of Your Dogma:

Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, tells a story about a young student attending three lectures by a very famous rabbi. The student said the first lecture was very good --- he understood everything. The second lecture was much better --- the student didn’t understand it but the rabbi understood everything. The third lecture was the best of all --- it was so good that even the rabbi didn’t understand it. Bohr tells this story because he says he never understood quantum physics, even though he helped create it.  

And one other thing: when Larry is saying to Clive, "Even I don't understand the dead cat," the audio was apparently dubbed in. You can see his lips still moving for a fraction of a second after he says "dead cat."

The Rabbis

The woman at the lake in the leg braces that Larry talks to before seeing a rabbi turns out to have better things to say to comfort Larry than any of the three rabbis, who only get progressively worse. Rabbi #1 is not bad, suggesting a change in perspective (“just look at the parking lot, Larry!), which is advice that makes sense to Larry once he gets stoned with the seductive sunbather. Rabbi #2 is awful, totally non-spiritual, telling the same unhelpful story to people who come in needing spiritual help. The lawyer in his sportsman’s lair is a more spiritual person and more empathetic than Rabbi #2.

And what’s the problem with rabbi #3, the great and wise Marshak? Maybe he’s thinking or meditating or whatever, but he just seems senile. And he won’t even see Larry, (“too busy” everyone says) although they literally see each other (if Marshak can see that far) before Marshak’s horror-story of a secretary closes the sliding door.

I certainly think it’s cool that Marshak quotes the lyric of “Somebody to Love” (changing “joy” to “hope”) and he names the members of “The Airplane!” when Danny gets in to see him, but it’s significant that Marshak tries to pronounce Jorma Kaukonen’s last name and can’t, and ignores Danny as he mouths the correct pronunciation in a whisper. Then Marshak tells Danny, who is of course happy (and the audience is happy) that he gets back his radio and twenty dollar bill, to “be a good boy.”

Okay, I almost forgot. Marshak does say “Den vaht?” after misquoting the lyric: “When the truth is found to be lies /and all the hope within you dies.” That, at least, is a worthwhile question.

The great physicist Niels Bohr liked to tell a story about three rabbis, and how it related to explaining quantum mechanics. I’ll have to look it up.

What really makes A Serious Man funny is the acting of Michael Stuhlbarg. He’s on a par with, and seems to be a linear combination of, Harold Lloyd and Robin Williams.

It's the Standard Deviation dummie (sorry)

The mathematical thingy Larry was writing on the board in the classroom dream sequence is just the common, how-could-I-forget, well-known standard deviation. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in position-momentum language says that the product of the standard deviation of position and the standard deviation of momentum cannot be smaller than Planck’s constant divided by 4π. 

My favorite reference on this subject is David J. Griffiths book Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, 2nd edition, which shows a drawing of a live cat on the front and a dead cat on the back. Although if you didn’t know better you could think the back cat was sleeping. It’s proposed as a mere thought experiment only, so no need to worry about the cat. And, as Griffiths mentions in his book, the problem is not considered a paradox by most physicists.

Intro

Shrodinger's cat is "in limbo" said the textbook used in the first physics class I enrolled in, which was at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, in the year--well never mind the year.  The textbook was Physics for the Life Sciences, by Alan Cromer.  I lost the textbook or maybe someone stole it and I've thought since then that whenever I find that book, that will be when I solve the paradox of Schrodinger's Cat.  It's been a long time, and the textbook has not reappeared, so it's becoming likely I will not solve the paradox. 

The cat paradox was put to good use in the movie A Serious Man.  I'll be discussing the movie and the cat problem in this blog.  I'll start with a problem that occurs in the classroom dream scene in the movie, a problem you might have noticed.  Larry writes an equation on the board that contains the square root of <P>^2 - <P>^2.   It's quite easily seen to be zero--something minus itself--but of course his answer isn't zero.

After the class leaves (one of the Coen brothers can be seen getting up from a front row seat) and Larry and Sy are talking (Sy would be a dybbuk in the dream, by the way) the equation is on the board behind Larry, but now it's been corrected!  Now underneath  the square root is <P^2> - <P>^2, which is what it should have been in the first place. This is an expression from statistics, not just from physics.  I'll come back to it later.  Another thing about that scene is that Sy calls mathematics the art of the possible.  Larry is a little flustered by this, and says he thinks something else is the art of the possible, but he can't remember what.  I could well identify with Larry in that scene, partly because the mathematical thing he wrote on the board is called something, but right now I can't remember what...  However,  I did look up "the art of the possible."  It's politics, not math, so Larry was right, but couldn't "prove" it at the time.