Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said: ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’ As people who have never professed to understand quantum mechanics, The Fence finds this statement quite presumptuous, but decided we’d ask some of the world’s biggest boffins how much they do or don’t know about their jobs, lives, and everything else besides.
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THE FENCE
: In the vein of Feynman, is there one part of your own discipline which you have never fully grasped?
PROF. DAVID CARD (ECONOMICS, 2021)
Many things in the labour market are very hard to understand. For example, I find it very hard to understand whether people stay on their current job because they are uninformed (or misinformed) about other jobs, or because their current job is the best of all possible jobs, or because they are just too tired (or scared) to look for something else.
PROF. ANGUS DEATON (ECONOMICS, 2015)
For me, macroeconomics is like quantum mechanics. Though it is not just me. It changes shape all of the time, and I have done economics long enough to see what is true – and what is not true – change places over and over again. Slightly differently, there is an idea in statistics, used also in economics, called ‘regression to the mean’. Ask any economist or statistician if they understand it, and they will all say yes, of course. But the great statistician David Freedman used to say of testifying in court that whoever has to explain ‘regression to the mean’ to the judge has thereby lost the case. As an example, suppose poorer countries always grow faster than richer countries. So their income must get closer together over time? No, not necessarily. That is an example of ‘regression to the mean’ sowing confusion.
PROF. ANTHONY LEGGETT (PHYSICS, 2003)
Well, I missed out on standard high-school physics, so have always been a bit confused about simple things like why the noise from a kettle stops as the water nears boiling.
