Science - Understanding Science

This week was an AHA week for me.

I was an undergraduate at very intense scientific institution. I emerged with good grades and very little knowledge and appreciation for science. In fact, at the exit I flat out despised science.

Currently, I am working in a field I know very little about and frankly have very little experience in. In fact, my exposure thus far has left me as disgruntled as I was with science.

The reason is that all of these hot topics fields always start with fancy notations, and fancy claims, and fancy language but when it comes down to the decisive, subtle step it is always hand-waving or as it is referred to by the professionals i.e experts it comes down to art.

In this second field, this week I had to present about feature selection strategies utilized by machine learning algorithms. All strategies are really different forms of art. The word on the street is that if you gain experience i.e start getting your hands dirty you will learn to recognize what strategy works when and why and you can be creative with the invention of new such strategies.

In relation to my undergraduate experience I decided that since sooner or later I will love to explain the scientific concepts to my children in as clear a language as possible, I might as well quit complaining abot having failed to learn and understand the concepts and start re-learning and in fact learning things I never learned but now wonder about. So, I began taking an online Thermodynamics refresher course. As I was finishing the week's quiz, it occurred to me that science is all about feature selection-defining the features, selecting the features and describing the system in terms of these features. So, my discomfort with my current field is only very natural.  Basically in science, there are so many things you can measure. Eventually you have to settle for a few that describe your system well enough, and that's that! There are alternatives but one working formulation suffices.

In light of this I have decided to start a new blog in which I will collect i.e. record every single scientific question that comes to my mind as I read scientific books, textbooks, take classes, etc.