Dr. Zhen-Yi CAI （蔡振翼，Zin-Iak CUA）

• • 本科生课程

• ◦ 电磁学A（2023春；2024春）
• ◦ 电磁学B（2025春）
• ◦ 电磁学C（2024秋）
• ◦ “科学与社会”研讨课（2020秋至2021春）

• • 研究生课程

• ◦ 星系天文学（2022秋）
• ◦ 天体物理中的辐射过程（2025秋）

• • 本科班主任

• ◦ 20级物院6班

A pedagogical instruction in the philosophy on “modeling” versus “measuring”:

• • If a model reproduces observations with no adjustment of parameters then it establishes an interesting connection between the new observations and the ones against which its parameters were previously tuned. In this case theoretical insight comes from understanding why no additional tuning was needed;
• • If a model’s parameters are tuned to reproduce observations, then the tuning process can be viewed as a “measurement”, which is interesting, but actually reproducing those observations is not interesting. In this case new insight comes from exploring the physical implications of the adjustments that were necessary in order to yield agreement.