Three-level Model for Reaching Mature Scientific Thinking

May 10, 2020

I spend last two days reading Jakob Schwichtenberg’s Teach Yourself Physics, in which Jacob introduced multiple inspiring books of scientific philosophy. Philosophy has not been a part of my life since my high school where Chinese students are required to remember philosophical quotes of Confusius and Laozi. Over the last decade, philosophical concepts like Yin and Yang are just fancy words that I use whenever I need to show people I know stuff. As a research assistant it is so easy for me to draw an equivalence sign between philosophy and subjective perspectives. Since my work is to provide objective views of how electrode materials evolve during physio-chemical processes, I used to believe that there is no need to learn things from people who spend their whole life in isolation and write out their hard-to-fanthom thoughts.

There is no need to further emphasize that life is karma. Right after my research projects needed me to dive into quantum mechanics, I got overwhelmed by complicated calculations and bizarre notations. The logics behind well-known postulates and theorems Nobel laureates developed hardly struck a string in my heart. Needless to say, I should gain my understanding from bottom to top. Because normal students follow univerisity curriculum religiously, I first tried to make sense out of QM by taking undergrad level classes. Things are easy in the class and I got a straight A. The professor was happy that I was there to answer the questions nobody cared to know. You know moments like that might make you think you’re smart. With all the notes packed in my bag at the end of semester, I quickly forgot what I learned from the class and still had no idea how to proceed my research using QM.

Jakob expressed his concerns of students seeing university curriculum as the only way to learn physics. In fact, in many cases he stressed that the textbooks and classes are designed for general audiences, sometimes just for professors themselves. Every student puts vastly different background on the table when he or she attends a class, and standard explanations might not make sense to them at all. My story with QM was not that bad at beginning because the professor believes the rule of “shut up and calculate”, anyone who can go through all the homework problem sets develops their understanding of QM from a mathematical perspective. But how do those concepts fall into places in order to solve a real-world problem? Why did the fathers of QM formulate theories in that way? And what is the necessity to combine QM with special relativity to deliver quantum field theory? A normal univeristy QM course would tell you little or nothing about the answers to aforementioned questions. In other words, we attend the classes to fill the requirements for a degree. And the professors teach the classes to fill their faculty duties. The conventional class settings these days are not motivating students to become effective thinkers.

Instead of following a guided tour defined by your professors, Jakob really sees the power of self-learning. His advice for an effective self learner can break into five steps:

• Grab a student-friendly introduction to a subject that interests you the most. Read it cover to cover, and don’t worry too much about the details.
• Try to summarize the fundamentals from your readings along the way. You can do it by writing your own notes (not simply copy the paragraphs from books!), or by teaching other people what you learned
• Practice your skills by taking on real-world problems using a top-bottom methodology, which means you need to learn mathematics in time and ask/answer questions consistently
• Level up your understanding by reviewing different formulations on the same theory
• Try to find the philosophical connections between different theories

Jakob’s five-step self-learning scheme is really a relief as some of the steps have become my daily practice, meaning that I am not as hopeless as I thought I was. His method also reflects Nat Eliason’s three-level psychology model for developing mature scientific thinking:

• Level 1: Blind Ideology (看山是山，看水是水)

  People at level 1 believe everything they heard from their superiors, and are afraid of leaving behind

• Level 2: Chosen Ideology (看山不是山，看水不是水)

  People at this level start to realize the best thing they learned is probably not from their professors/advisors, and become obssessed with new ideas and being disobedient towards their old belief.

• Level 3: Ideology Transcendence (看山还是山，看水还是水)

  People start to sample the best of prepackaged belief systems and realize that no ideology is perfect. At level 3 people start to develop their unique understanding of subjects that fits their observation and experiences.

As a senior graduate student I am pretty sure that I’m a level-2 person. Like what Jakob said in the book:

The step from level 2 to level 3 is only possible through lots of moments of clarity. Only we are exposed to lots of contradictory points of view, we can recognize the flaws in each prepackaged belief system. To reach level 3 we need to read books and papers that make us uncomfortable.

With many aspects of the book still remain to be said, Let me close the gate of writing nonsense in my mind by giving my general impression for the book:

Teach Yourself Physics is not for people who wanna start their career in academia, but for curious, sometimes too curious to avoid student-advisor tensions, minds to make their own map for exploration on the continent of physics.