A cargo cult understanding is probably superior to no understanding because science operates at different levels of abstraction. Most programmers have a cargo cult understanding of hardware for example.
Well, I'm talking about three levels of "understanding":
The "physics for poets" level I graduated high school with (including a great book on quantum chemistry I checked out from my local college's library, I think). This is useful, albeit dangerous as I've been saying, and enough to thrive at MIT with.
The cargo cult algebra based physics, only used in "education". E.g. the difference between Sears, Zemansky and Young's University Physics vs. College Physics
And calculus based physics.
My claim is that if you were to rank order their usefulness, it would be calculus, poets and then algebra way behind. I'd like to hear from some people who went from algebra to calculus based physics how that worked for them. I certainly found learning physics for real with calculus to be a joy....
ADDED: As for programmers and systems types ... yeah. While electronics intrinsically does nothing for me, I've always studied hardware to know how to build programs and systems better, and that's done me very well.
And the level of understanding can be appalling, we've had several discussions recently about big clusters failing at load and being replaces by a single system, often a surplus desktop, because the programmer had a clue.
hga|11 years ago
The "physics for poets" level I graduated high school with (including a great book on quantum chemistry I checked out from my local college's library, I think). This is useful, albeit dangerous as I've been saying, and enough to thrive at MIT with.
The cargo cult algebra based physics, only used in "education". E.g. the difference between Sears, Zemansky and Young's University Physics vs. College Physics
And calculus based physics.
My claim is that if you were to rank order their usefulness, it would be calculus, poets and then algebra way behind. I'd like to hear from some people who went from algebra to calculus based physics how that worked for them. I certainly found learning physics for real with calculus to be a joy....
ADDED: As for programmers and systems types ... yeah. While electronics intrinsically does nothing for me, I've always studied hardware to know how to build programs and systems better, and that's done me very well.
And the level of understanding can be appalling, we've had several discussions recently about big clusters failing at load and being replaces by a single system, often a surplus desktop, because the programmer had a clue.