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."
