3 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science
A question for physicists, chemists, mathematicians, other people who work with very tiny or abstract things:
When you are doing work on inflaton fields, or quantum foam, or atoms exchanging electrons or whatever, do you have a picture in your mind of what it "looks" like, or is it enough to work with the numbers and data?
As a simple-minded outsider, when I think of hydrogen bonding with oxygen, I always have an image of two magnetic pool balls coming together and attaching to one another, even though I know this isn't how it really appears. When I hear a lecture telling me that subatomic particles are more like waves of energy, I picture a little glowing wave flying through space, undulating like a flatfish.
In short, I must always draw a picture. Do you professionals do this, too? If so, what images help you the most? Are some images more accurate than others, and does it matter?
Comment by melanch0liia at 20/07/2022 at 22:38 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Physicist doing quantum optics PhD - in short, yes! Almost every time my supervisor is trying to explain something complex to me, he looks around to grab some paper and a pen to "draw a cartoon". And when I'm thinking hard about a problem or the "physics" of what is happening in something I might be measuring, I definitely have a cartoon in my head - typically the photons are like ping pong balls bouncing around the optics. It gets a bit more complex when I'm trying to imagine things like their polarisation state or spin state, for specific devices/set ups.
Although in the past I have had colleagues who say that they don't have a "mind's eye" - I remember a friend once saying, if I asked him to imagine a pink elephant, he can't see a mental image at all, he just thinks the words. I found this absolutely astonishing, no idea if there is a name for it.
TL;DR - yes. Pictures are great. No, I don't think it matters, as long as you can effectively communicate what your "cartoon" means when explaining to others. You find cartoons in scientific papers all the time, they just call them "schematics" instead!
Comment by Indemnity4 at 21/07/2022 at 01:07 UTC*
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Chemist. I do form pictures in my head and I can best describe it like opening tabs in a web browser that show images from a textbook.
I may start with the ping pong balls in my head, or something like a Lego brand building block structure. I have a pretty good idea based on what I do, electron microscopy or neutron scanning what atoms/molecules are doing. In my head, I can do some simple quick thought 3D models to narrow down my ideas before starting experiments.
I then move onto a new tab with electron clouds, which do look a bit weird once you get into higher level classes. Goes from ping pong balls to shaped clouds of potential energy. Let's me do some quick probabilities such as I think this has 5% chance of working because that other shape is much more preferable/easier.
Once I start moving to fine electron structure it's stack horizontal lines separated by distances. I can probably get singlet/triplet crossing images like you see in a textbook.
Phonons I'm still visualising as balls on a string or a really simple waveform diagram.
Anything with waves and I'm moving my hands around like I'm conducting an orchestra. Same with aligning magnetic fields for anything pulsed where I'll be okay this goes down 90° (move arm from vertical to horizontal), then the signal randomly degenerates (start spreading out fingers while moving arm around horizontally), then this part of the signal coalesces (move outer two fingers together), etc.