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Record W2107762826 · doi:10.24908/pceea.v0i0.3759

"PHYSICS ENVY" AND ENGINEERING DESIGN

2011· article· en· W2107762826 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Paul Winkelman

Bibliographic record

VenueProceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldNeuroscience
TopicCognitive Science and Education Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCredibilityFunction (biology)PhenomenonEpistemologyEngineering ethicsPhysicsTheoretical physicsEngineeringQuantum mechanicsBiologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

“Physics envy” is the condition where non-physicists attempt to model their discipline after physics in the hope of gaining credibility. This ailment is not uncommon among engineers and its negative impact is most strongly felt in engineering design. Biology offers some insights into this phenomenon for it, too, suffers from “physics envy” but has the luxury of a strong philosophical base to draw on. Much of what separates engineering and biology from physics can be attributed to a preoccupation with function. Within the paradigm of physics, however, function is a foreign concept. We can ponder the function of a human organ or a mechanical part, but the entities of physics, such as atoms, have no functions, only effects. Function implies the possibility of failure, such as a heart failure or a mechanical breakdown, but atoms never fail; they simply are. Function speaks of systems which cannot be contained within spatiotemporal boundaries, boundaries which physics cannot transgress. “Physics envy” therefore serves to undermine research and practice in engineering design.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.263
Threshold uncertainty score0.417

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.050
GPT teacher head0.241
Teacher spread0.191 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designBench or experimental
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2011
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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