<p>Majors I hate with a strong passion - Any thats in CoLA (Psychology, Journalism, Public Relations, Economics, etc.), Business majors, Pre-XXX majors (at my school their is such a major yes), and Biology/Biochem/Chem majors (curriculum is mostly electives).
Majors I respect- Math and Physics , and Nursing (where the hotties are at)</p>
<p>I understand why some of you resent certain majors but remember that those majors do not compete with you for engineering jobs. Unless you are resentful those people get to have a social life and you don’t. In that case is your own fault.</p>
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<p>engineering majors are vocational training too . . .</p>
<p>^Eh… that’s fuzzy. Vocational training is rarely offered at a 4 year university. Engineering at most universities carries enough theory to make it an academic profession. </p>
<p>[Vocational</a> education - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“Vocational education - Wikipedia”>Vocational education - Wikipedia)
[Vocational</a> education in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocational_education_in_the_United_States]Vocational”>Vocational education in the United States - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>I thought averagely engineering people get more sleep than medical and english major. lol</p>
<p>hadsed, natural phenomenons are a part of nature, and therefore physics does explain nature - in a sense (and this should easily be inferred from my post, without this analysis). However, I don’t see it explaining pain in patients, or how nausea occurs, or skin grafts (actually maybe a little - barely). Would you describe gravity as ‘nature’? “Oh yeah… you know that thing… that nature thing… it starts with a g, I forget.” Certainly it is natural so it must be nature, but a more defined description would be natural phenomenon, because nature can encompass many things - some of which cannot be described by physics (“cannot” meaning that it is not even in its realm of study, not meaning things like gravity, string theory, quantum mech., etc.).</p>
<p>jwxie, medical major?</p>
<p>@ EngineerHead,</p>
<p>Physicians mostly.
lol</p>
<p>Definite respect for pure math majors / actuarial science majors.</p>
<p>Also, chemistry, physics, biochem.</p>
<p>I’ve also got alot of respect for certified blue-collar types like plumbers and electricians, HVAC techs, etc. Their skills and services are much more valuable than alot of the BS that comes out of university these days.</p>
<p>Well I find it very reasonable and true that engineers get more sleep than med students, possibly even engineering graduate students. I don’t follow the logic for english majors, though. Lots of reading, lots of writing, but I still don’t hear a lot of problems in the english department with retention rates and such.</p>
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Most of these things can be explained at an atomic level. For things like pain and nausea, we’ve associated them with certain chemicals in the brain (for nausea) and small electric signals in the neural network for pain. That is all physics, and things like that are why medical students have to study physics as well. Skin grafts are more explainable… perhaps. Which brings me to a side-note; just because we haven’t discovered it yet doesn’t mean it won’t be part of physics and in fact you necessarily have to infer that it would be part of physics because physics encompasses everything that happens in nature really . Maybe that’s the problem… when I say nature I mean the universe. Gravity is a force of nature in the universe… what else is it?</p>
<p>It describes the natural world perfectly, except for perhaps things like consciousness and obviously more socially oriented studies. But that is not the natural world, you could argue, that it is a mental world and different from nature because it is independent of nature’s laws.</p>
<p>Shrug. There are some things that just aren’t part of nature (if you believe certain philosophies). For everything else, there’s physics.</p>
<p>Physics explains atomic interactions, and so it is easily arguable considering all matter consists of atoms. However, just because pain and nausea have underlying atomic interactions, interactions which could be explained by physics, does not mean pain and nausea can be explained by physics. Whatever you just went and read may be stretching the truth a bit, nausea is still inexplicable. If the physics of things in medicine were easily explainable on an atomic level, then why do so many medications fail. These neurological signals that cause the brain to interpret pain occur in an atomic manner (as do all things, I guess), but even our best pain killers can’t stop the pain. Why? Don’t we know the “physics” behind it all? Certainly these issues are not like quantum gravity or time or universal expansion or black holes. </p>
<p>The reason is the understanding of these problems requires not just an atomic level of understanding. It requires a whole realm of study in all levels and across many different, seemingly unrelated things (things = organs/body structures, in this case). Sure pain is a result of electrical signaling within the body. But pain is more than just electrical signaling. Pain can also be fake, pain can be emotionalized resulting in more or less pain, etc. Now how can you have “more or less” pain, certainly pain is of one magnitude. You get pinched in a spot of a specific pressure and you should ideally feel the same pain, always, right? Of course we all know this to be false. Pain can be influenced by physical injury, emotions, hormones, etc. If you’re unconscious, there is absolutely no pain at ALL. On the other end of the spectrum, there could be absolutely NO physical injury, external nor internal, and yet an individual could still experience pain (this is a phenomenon that befuddles physicians). This pain comes with no “proof,” so to say. No logical reasoning for why the pain is occurring, except that it is indeed occurring.</p>
<p>@ engineerhead</p>
<p>Right I have to agree with you from that prospective. Biology in general does not always fit in physical science, if you start talking about DNA, proteins, and stuff. Certainly, we can discuss the atomic structures of them. LOL</p>
<p>and to my point of English majors:</p>
<p>well people who are journalists, secretaries and writers (especially people who work for government leaders), they typically write a lot and read a lot.</p>
<p>I don’t know. To me math and physics is the basis for everything else. Humans probably only understand like 1% of the physical universe they live in. If they understood 100% of it, then hadsed’s argument would be correct. Except I don’t agree that “some things just aren’t a part of nature”. That doesn’t even make sense.</p>
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Do you not understand the point? How could it be any clearer. Is it possible to define everything in life imaginable to fixed, finite mere equations containing no single exception? If yes, then obviously the analysis in your post would ensue - your comment is useless. If no, then obviously your analysis would not be possible. In fact, your first sentence works against you. If we can only understand 1% of it then what makes anyone think we could understand all of it or presume that we could understand all of it by means of mere equations?</p>
<p>Secondly, I never said “some things just aren’t a part of nature.” Please don’t cause misconception with your quote marks while you’re directing speech towards (seemingly) me (since I’m the only one arguing this point - logical). I made it clear in my second post; physics does explain “nature” in a technical sense, and therefore all (or maybe not? who knows), but that’s still not the whole truth - and we will never know this truth.</p>
<p>It seems we have a fundamental misunderstanding about exactly what “physics” is. I see it as the exploration of the physical universe we live in, you seem to be describing it as a branch of applied mathematics. I’m only a college sophomore with limited understanding of the subject so I’ll concede until I’m older and have confidence in my ability to argue about the subject.</p>
<p>Also, I said that we --currently-- only have a 1% understanding of our physical universe (there’s really no way to quantify this statement, it is pure philosophy), not that what we already know is all that we can know.</p>
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<p>when you start earning hella dollars in your vocation, it becomes a profession.</p>
<p>i just thought that it was funny that you were looking down on some subjects for being job training but didn’t apply that same reasoning for engineering. engineering degrees are job training.</p>
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You are forgetting one important thing: physics is physics, regardless of whether we know some aspects of it or not. Just because we aren’t sure why some painkillers don’t work doesn’t mean we don’t understand the concepts behind why they should work, in the limitations of our current knowledge. That is to say that we may be wrong in some aspects, but biophysics hasn’t been studied extensively, compared to say, classical physics. Still, the important point of a difference between what really is and what we understand currently is something that must be addressed as I feel you’re confusing the two.</p>
<p>If you will argue consciousness, perception, or other such things, then again I’ll remind you that there are some governing laws to show why certain things happen. We know roughly what part of the brain triggers what emotions, what we can do to offset them or make them disappear, things like that. But yes, we don’t know how we actually think. The closest we’ve been able to come up with is a computer with an x-number of parallel processes (the x not being very high, relative to human brains atleast), and even that is severely limited. So we can’t say we have satisfying explanations. But it’s out there somewhere.</p>
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There is physics in medicine, and it presents itself very clearly too. You can examine molecular structures and find what tissue is and why it grows and how to make it and so on. In this light, I’m not sure what these other realms of study are and why they can’t be traced back to physics.</p>
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I must again bring up the point that just because we haven’t discovered it yet, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and so my previous statements on perception and thought can be applied in this case. That being said, the solution your example may be something simple that we just haven’t stumbled upon yet. Take our current knowledge on neuroscience and other applicable disciplines of medicine; we know that emotions are caused (or the effects of, there are entire psychology books written on this) chemicals in our brains. Whether there is a way to release those chemicals by some other means than such a crude relay system as our perceived neural network (I stress, perceived by us at our current level of understanding) of a simple charge setting off the release or something much more elaborate, we know several things already and we can say it is reasonable that this or that is true. So, to some limits of course, we can explain these things, just not very well [yet].</p>
<p>You may come up with an argument asking, if we know so little about the universe and nature, how can we say that physics and mathematical laws govern everything? Well, we can say that we hardly know anything in the scope of the universe, but there’s no doubt that we have discovered a substantial amount of… ‘data’, let’s say. The more ‘data’ you have, the higher your ‘accuracy’ is. We have so much that has been proven over and over again through a constant barrage of experiments. Medicine and engineering are successful only because of our successes in mathematics and the sciences (though I would say engineering more so, medicine was a bit unlucky in relation to mathematics as it still seems to be stumbling around in the dark somewhat). So we can logically deduce that if all of our laws up till this point are true, and they follow the same general trend (and don’t be fooled by the scope of things, realize that we do actually know a lot of stuff). That is, we can say that nature can be completely described by physics and mathematics.</p>
<p>As a footnote more than anything, I think I need to address a detail in my last post. When I mentioned ‘not part of nature’, I was speaking of the philosophical arguments for consciousness by Descartes (I believe it was him). Hope that cleared up something that admittedly does seem nonsensical at first.</p>
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<p>this is just wishful thinking, but suppose that we could somehow obtain this.</p>
<p>how will we know when we reach this point?</p>
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<p>one impediment to understanding biophysics is that the systems that are studied in biophysics are way more complex than the ideal problems you do in your mechanics class . . . it is really difficult & computationally expensive to apply basic physics principles to non-simple systems.</p>
<p>Actually, there is no way to understand 100% of the physical universe. Universe is simply a mystery to human. The secret of universe is beyond human wisdom.</p>
<p>I am not preaching religion here, but I urge you to think about it.</p>
<p>M any of the hundreds of more elementary particles are hypothetical. Their existences are based on the mathematics that the great physicists derived. Some of them have been proved their existences through experiments, indirectly, and directly, while many of them still remained hypothetical to us.</p>
<p>So if there are hundreds of new fundamental particles, then what are the more elementary particles before their existences? Ultimately, let say we are able to find the very last particle, you would have to question yourself, “where and how did this particle exist?” Now, we are really stuck in a philosophy course.</p>
<p>It is true that physics, ultimately, is a philosophy course, which is based on mathematics and humanity.</p>
<p>While Dr. Kaku (he teaches at my college) still promoting his version of string theory, recently people are arguing the validity of dark elements, we don’t have any progress in terms of understanding what universe is about. </p>
<p>They said gravitational, electromagnetic, and strong and weak nuclear forces should ultimately unified, connected, described and explained by a good equation. But what if there is an additional force? </p>
<p>As much as I like physics, and not to mean to offend anyone: physics can never read the minds of creation :)</p>
<p>lol ^ i take it you haven’t taken modern physics yet?</p>