it's an interesting point. is it worthwhile to struggle through an incidental task that has been solved before? we all stand on the shoulders of giants
replyI think in most cases, understanding is the point. we don't expect students to derive general relativity before doing astrophysics. re-invention is only a tool for understanding
“Understanding” without being able to use that knowledge for anything isn’t useful for getting stuff done.
replyThe flip side is even more interesting. There’s a great number of electrical engineers with significant physics backgrounds who don’t really understand how electricity actually works, but they can still solve useful problems. By understanding I mean they can describe what underlying physical phenomena reactance represents etc.
Small counterpoint to your analogy, as someone who studied astrophysics: I actually did have a requirement to understand general relativity! Deriving all of it independently from scratch wasn't something we did, but there _were_ derivations involved. And it was definitely worth working through -- it _is_ a good tool for understanding. (I've long since left the field, but I don't regret the work I did.)
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