I had been putting off quantum physics and time was running out. I was worried forth semester physics at MIT was going to be tough, but then through some miracle of providence the EE department decided that a solid state chemistry chemistry class plus Into to Biology could be substituted for quantum physics.
Because I had already taken a solid state chemistry class, all I had to do was take a basic introductory biology class; how difficult could that be? It turns out that biology is hard, very hard.
The other students that filled the large lecture hall weren’t ordinary first year students; they were pre-med students. Instead of relaxing by the swimming pool reading a colorful text with pictures of jelly fish and beetles, it felt more like I was taking swim lessons with a few hundred sharks.
The lectures by Professor Luria were great (he had won the Nobel prize four years before) but the number of facts seemed impossible to remember. My fellow students were writing down literally every word written or uttered during each lecture. There wasn’t any mention of jelly fish or bugs or pea plants, but there were complex diagrams depicting even more complex biochemical pathways. I was accustomed to math classes and engineering classes and computer science classes. Biology was very different, more facts and less study of how to apply fundamental principles to prove some theorem or solve some engineering problem.
I survived the Biology class, but it would have been a lot easier for me to take the physics class.
Biology classes kinda get easier in the later years (at least they did for me), because although they start of with a lot of "don't worry about why this happens, just know that it happens", we got to the "this is why it happens", and it all starts to fall into place. There are some fundamental principles, so far as we actually know them, in biology, however it does seem to be taught in a broad-to-narrow direction that imo does a disservice to those wanting to really understand the mechanisms.
because at least in molecular biology, there are no basic rules, how can we know any "rule' if the only example is p53? but it is useful, so this is now condition.
I think this depends a lot on the person. For example, my brain is apparently good at completely memorizing a biology book. I fill in gaps in my knowledge (which seems to exists as a series of images and animations in my head, call it a "world" model perhaps) with what I read. It all makes sense.
Maths however... It takes me seemingly endless amounts of energy to grasp things. My PhD was in Biophysics, and my colleagues were mostly physicists and they felt the other way around. They didn't understand how it could be harder to derive almost everything from basic principles and techniques than to memorize a colorful story about how life works.
Together we could do nice things though, me drawing pictures on one side of the white board, colleagues writing equations on the other side. It was a nice time.
> which seems to exists as a series of images and animations in my head, call it a "world" model perhaps
This is how most things are in my mental model of almost all higher-order concepts and subject areas. Mostly for math, but also for programming/electronics, biology, chemistry, history, etc.
The thing that usually stops me from forming this kind of picture is missing a fundamental concept, or not being able to conceptualize enough of them in my limited exposure to the subject.
The thing to realize is that this isn't a thing that just happens, it's something you can build yourself as you're learning something. Since the visuospatial parts of your brain are the most powerful, it can be an enormously useful thing to do to fit subjects together and reason about them.
Anecdotally, the "easiest" math/engineering classes I had in college were the ones with robust visual representations (control systems with the transfer function block diagrams and mechanism design with a simple graphical way to design linkages where we learned the math afterward).
The thing I found about biology in my limited study of it is that if a physical effect can happen, it's almost certainly used somewhere as a functional effect.
I'm regular puzzled that people think that biology is tractable. It seems to me the best we can hope for towards a complete understanding is a computational generative model.
Do you know any examples of semiconductor junctions being used in biological processes? It would be hilarious to me if there was a bacterium out there that just ”invented” a transistor or a diode for some silly reason.
Paper on biological diodes https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.00383.pdf but it doesn't use semiconductors, but ion transport (calls it iontronics instead of solid state electronics)
Indeed the ion channels used by nerves and muscles to send electrical signals are, like, one-way valves for ions
The interesting thing is that knowing these facts has no correlation with whether you are a good biologist.
Real biology involves designing clever wet lab experiments, analysing data to predict new phenomenon, then following up with more experiments.
Nothing in real life biology relies on knowing a huge amount of facts. You just look it up on google.
What makes biology hard to teach is that there are no principles. So teacher can just point to experimental results and ask students to memorise those results. Real biology is about saying the textbooks are all wrong and here is how it really works.
The amount of things you need to learn in biology is truly hard, though from what I've heard, there's nothing harder than quantum physics, since it's so fundamentally different from how we're used to seeing things.
Don't believe the hype. Follow the math where your instincts fail you. Check out HyperPhysics if you haven't seen it. Provides a super useful map where you can see how all the concepts relate and how they fit together:
I think that's his point. Your instincts fail you all the time when studying stuff smaller than atoms
Most people don't have a gut feeling for overriding their instincts in favour of math. In fact, when you read some behavioural sciences you'll notice that overriding math with your instincts is the norm
That's the purpose of the first 2 years of a Physics education. Getting the students to the point where their understanding of the math informs their intuition, rather than the other way around. Somewhere in the second year you do some experiments that demonstrate that in quantum and relativity, their intuitions are wrong and cannot be trusted, and then you dive into the good stuff.
Biology does have quite a few phenomena that rely on quantum effects. I would be careful of calling something that's just a subset harder than the whole larger set.
Because I had already taken a solid state chemistry class, all I had to do was take a basic introductory biology class; how difficult could that be? It turns out that biology is hard, very hard.
The other students that filled the large lecture hall weren’t ordinary first year students; they were pre-med students. Instead of relaxing by the swimming pool reading a colorful text with pictures of jelly fish and beetles, it felt more like I was taking swim lessons with a few hundred sharks.
The lectures by Professor Luria were great (he had won the Nobel prize four years before) but the number of facts seemed impossible to remember. My fellow students were writing down literally every word written or uttered during each lecture. There wasn’t any mention of jelly fish or bugs or pea plants, but there were complex diagrams depicting even more complex biochemical pathways. I was accustomed to math classes and engineering classes and computer science classes. Biology was very different, more facts and less study of how to apply fundamental principles to prove some theorem or solve some engineering problem.
I survived the Biology class, but it would have been a lot easier for me to take the physics class.