And I got a prof whose first sentences to us was: "I am only here because otherwise they'd pull my grants. I don't answer questions. I don't repeat myself."
I had a population/evolutionary genetics lecturer who walked in to the first lecture of my final year and said "I'm too hung over for this, go away" and left the theatre..
My first job, I was so excited to talk about quantum physics with the physics guy. He laughed and said, you wouldn’t understand it. I was so embarrassed and hurt. And he was so right.
I got my bachelor’s in film. One media theory class jumped the shark into quantum theory for a good chunk of the class. I still don’t understand why we studied it, which tracks, I suppose.
Yeah, and the first test you take the text books states "Einstein could not solve this equation" but then you have to. It's really just memorizing the Schrodinger equation (H psi=E psi) but it's intimidating.
I remember taking quantum mechanics in college. I remember the prof, who knew the material, was a terrible instructor. I remember discovering that the calculus pre-reqs I’d taken for the course were wholly inadequate. I remember learning a lot of math in a hurry.
I remember that I aced the course, because we got cheat sheets for each test and my cheat sheet-fu was formidable. .
I don’t remember a single bit of the math, and virtually nothing of the concepts.
Quantum mechanics is very high level of applied mathematics. Some discovered before any phenomena was seen, some figured out after to "explain" (with large quotes) the phenomena...
But the truth is, nobody can understand it... Our brains just don't work in that way...
One of my electrical engineering professors started the course with "this class will help you understand why a straight line is straight." I never forgot that but still don't understand it.
After every test you could see how disappointed he was with us all. Even when I cheated by having formulas written on parts of my body it didn't help one bit.
There's a reason Einstein hated the whole concept. It makes No. Fucking. Sense.
I recommend Shrodinger's Kittens And The Search For Reality by John Gribbin if you want your mind blown in a very accessible and engaging way. Great book.
Love this stuff, my college roommates were all engineers so I got to absorb their frustrations and relate to it while never actually understanding anything they said. Effin' diff eq am I right?!?!
Quantum stuff in general is just beyond my brain completely. Like, I’m a computer guy. I understand the basics of how a CPU works. It’s filled with tiny switches that are on (true) or off (false).
Then fuckers made a quantum one and went “this one can do both at the same time”. And I just can’t even.
If you want nice, juicy quantum headaches go watch the tv series Devs. It’s really good.
I once had a very intelligent chemistry prof who managed to explain it in such a way that for a brief, shining, roughly two hour period, I felt as though I actually understood the physical mechanism behind Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
That one’s actually one of the easier ones to sort out; it’s really not as mysterious as people make it out to be. I like to start with a very familiar example when explaining it - motion blur in photography. Imagine you’re a sports photographer taking a picture of a pitcher throwing the baseball. You might use a slow shutter speed, and wind up with a picture of the baseball that’s just a streak. That photograph is giving you really poor data of where the ball was when, because you can’t really
look at the picture and see ball, you see a smeared image of the ball. And because shutter speed was so long, you can’t say where the ball was in that particular “instant” because it’s actually many instances in time that the shutter was open for. But what you do get is information about the speed of the ball - you can tell that for the duration that the shutter was open, the ball was travelling at such a speed that it travelled such a distance to create the resulting blur. By contrast, you can
take a photo with a very fast shutterspeed, and if you do that you can get a much clearer picture of the ball. Fast enough shutterspeed, and you can actually get an extremely clear picture of the ball… so clear it looks like it’s not even moving. But in that photo, you have far more precision with which you can say where the ball was and at exactly which time it was there. And that’s the key to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle - you can know where something is, or you can know fast it’s
moving, but you can’t know both at the same time. Indeed, the more effort you put into knowing exactly one of those things, the less precision you can have on knowing the other thing. That’s fundamentally it. Now, there is a deeper layer of meaning to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which is that it’s not just that you can’t *know* those things simultaneously, but that they fundamentally cannot *coexist* - a high-momentum particle cannot be said to have a well-defined position in space,
and vice versa. And that’s where I think a lot of people get lost, but that’s just because, I think, they get hung up on the idea of particles being like tiny little balls. A particle isn’t a ball. It also isn’t a wave. It’s its own thing with its own set of behaviours, and sometimes we can treat it like a ball and that will give the right answer and sometimes we treat it like a wave and that gives a good answer. So for the HUP, think about a particle as a wave, and think about the question of
In the video game Planescape: Torment, there was a faction called the Sensates that were all about capturing experiences. Good, bad, whatever. They had a hall (museum?) where they kept orbs that magically stored experiences for others to enjoy. Whenever I read something like you wrote, I always think, 'that would make a fine sensate orb.'
I understood some of it, on a liitle boat just after a storm on the Mississippi river, when the sun came out and the schrooms kicked in. The air was calm and the waves big but "rounded", but the waves were all reflecting the sunlight and the crests were all clearly made of many, many smaller waves. I was like, "It's all waves, man!" The accumulated study of years came crashing together as I puffed on a swisher cigar, and I had a breif feeling of transendence and wonder.
Quantum mechanics is like the NPCs in your dreams trying to figure out reality. It probably makes a lot of sense to people who aren't in it and experiencing it.
My dad was a Masters in physics. He says you have to take QM three times before you can act like you know what you're doing, even though you really don't.
I don't miss college exactly, but damn I miss being young and inquisitive and unburdened by the depressing realities of existence and believing I could do anything. The greatest people I know in my life are teachers, and so are some of the worst. A great teacher is one of the most valuable things you will ever meet in your life.
The most important thing I learned through college and real world is that I can NOT do anything. And most of that is because the people in power will prevent me from being able to.
My time in college would have been greatly enhanced if I could have just gone and listened to them. That's all. Just listen and learn. Homework and papers and exams instead presented as... see if you can figure out this stuff. Explore it. Research it. If you feel led to. Some people enjoy challenges. Some people just want to listen. If you're there to learn it, maybe there's some assignments you HAVE to do for a degree. But others should be allowed to just be there:)
You can do that, it's called auditing. Audit comes from Latin "to hear", and that's all you do when you audit. It's often free, too, since they don't have to spend their time marking your work. You could look around at local institutions and see what they offer for auditing. Nowadays you can also basically do that online.
I don't miss everything about college, but the things I do miss, I miss dearly. If I could live in a walkable community, spend 20 hours a week taking classes on whatever caught my fancy (without homework), and have the rest of my time free to do with as I pleased, I'd be pretty dang happy.
I miss having people who want to teach me things. I have some great mentors at my job, but man I wish I had paid more attention to world history in 10th grade. That stuff was so interesting!
I dropped out of college after freshman year and didn’t go back to school to finish my bachelor’s in liberal arts until 25 years later.
I found college much more rewarding the second time around. After having been out in the world for a while, and worked several different kinds of jobs, made new friends, had relationships both good and bad, etc. I was much better organized, and had a much deeper well of experience to draw from when it came to understanding things like literature and history.
True. My kids are both rushing toward adulthood as quickly as they can. It's funny when we're young and naive we think that we can't wait to get out and do whatever we want when the truth is we're as free as we'll ever be. I turned 41 this year. I've got a bum leg and as much as I usually like my job I'm still beholden to my corporate overlords. College was basically the sweet spot for freedom, creativity, and hobbies.
I would have never left if I didn't have to work for a living. I loved school, I love learning. I love problem-solving so I likely would have ended up in a research dept. But I'd still wanna take classes, lol. If I was independently wealthy I'd have so many degrees!!!
Same. I went back in my thirties and god what fun. Sure, there was some work, but I was used to busting my ass so I just got to love the learning and the environment and being around a bunch of inquisitive, open minded people.
I do get very high marks across the board, in STEM as well as "liberal arts" like english and philosophy. I got my electrical engineering degree and I was *one class* away from getting a Classics degree, which is what you get to do archaeology or other studies of ancient civilizations. I couldn't afford to stay another year to finish it though, and my course load from engineering was too high to fit another class in. But I'd have kept going, for sure. In both of those fields and more!!!
ktkn
That’s Ramamurti Shankar himself, author of “Principles of Quantum Mechanics.”
SecretAgentSuperBooger
GentlemanScientist
And I got a prof whose first sentences to us was: "I am only here because otherwise they'd pull my grants. I don't answer questions. I don't repeat myself."
4t0m1c4
I had a population/evolutionary genetics lecturer who walked in to the first lecture of my final year and said "I'm too hung over for this, go away" and left the theatre..
alrightalrightalrightpartyatthemoontower
My first job, I was so excited to talk about quantum physics with the physics guy. He laughed and said, you wouldn’t understand it. I was so embarrassed and hurt. And he was so right.
MarishkaGinny
I got my bachelor’s in film. One media theory class jumped the shark into quantum theory for a good chunk of the class. I still don’t understand why we studied it, which tracks, I suppose.
b0stark
Quantum mechanics taught me that I'm already dead; I just don't know it yet.
TeamSpicyTacos
Yeah, and the first test you take the text books states "Einstein could not solve this equation" but then you have to. It's really just memorizing the Schrodinger equation (H psi=E psi) but it's intimidating.
CMonster556
I remember taking quantum mechanics in college. I remember the prof, who knew the material, was a terrible instructor. I remember discovering that the calculus pre-reqs I’d taken for the course were wholly inadequate. I remember learning a lot of math in a hurry.
I remember that I aced the course, because we got cheat sheets for each test and my cheat sheet-fu was formidable. .
I don’t remember a single bit of the math, and virtually nothing of the concepts.
And never used any of it.
jackal12345
Nobody understands quantum theory, the math just checks out for some reason and we just kinda have to go with it.
zer0vector
This is a very accurate description of learning quantum mechanics.
LeftRightThere
MioTaalas
Quantum mechanics is very high level of applied mathematics. Some discovered before any phenomena was seen, some figured out after to "explain" (with large quotes) the phenomena...
But the truth is, nobody can understand it... Our brains just don't work in that way...
UnattendedDeviant
One of my electrical engineering professors started the course with "this class will help you understand why a straight line is straight." I never forgot that but still don't understand it.
After every test you could see how disappointed he was with us all. Even when I cheated by having formulas written on parts of my body it didn't help one bit.
MungChomper69420
That's gonna be a great class with a great professor
Skawomplious
There's a reason Einstein hated the whole concept. It makes No. Fucking. Sense.
I recommend Shrodinger's Kittens And The Search For Reality by John Gribbin if you want your mind blown in a very accessible and engaging way. Great book.
beachbum273
The really funny part is that the class thinks he is making jokes.
He is absolutely dead serious.
quasisentience
Anyone who says they understand qm really doesn't understand qm
AlmostClever
Love this stuff, my college roommates were all engineers so I got to absorb their frustrations and relate to it while never actually understanding anything they said. Effin' diff eq am I right?!?!
FoldedCorner
if only there was someway to find out where this video came from, oh wait it's yale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK2eFv7ne_Q
theytookthemall
I have studied a tiny bit of quantum mechanics at the undergrad level, just enough to confirm that I absolutely do not understand quantum mechanics.
Yasashii93
Quantum stuff in general is just beyond my brain completely. Like, I’m a computer guy. I understand the basics of how a CPU works. It’s filled with tiny switches that are on (true) or off (false).
Then fuckers made a quantum one and went “this one can do both at the same time”. And I just can’t even.
If you want nice, juicy quantum headaches go watch the tv series Devs. It’s really good.
itsthevoiceman
I would take that class!
eion85
I am thankful I'm smart enough to know how dumb I am when it comes to advanced science.
Still a total science nerd though.
kailord
I'm not a chemistry person, but I bloody love the In the Pipeline and TIWWW (Things I Won't Work With) blogs by Dr. Derek Lowe.
https://share.google/HcD7416phHUlLt0Uv In the Pipeline
https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-work-with
I especially recommend hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane entry 😅
azazyel
I understand the Monty Hall problem but it still annoys me that it's switch.
eion85
Same. I love problems that break my brain like that.
And they're also fucking annoying.
StellarJay77
Congratulations, you reached critical mass to clear the Dunning Kruger effect curve.
Maviyakuku
Can a piston be in four places at around the same time?
abacab87
Every night I go to bed listening to documentaries on Quantum Mechanics, thinking that one day a light bulb will go on.
slackboy722000
and then you wake up and turn on your bedside lamp.
smorsdoeuvres
I love him already and I want to take his class even though I’m terrible at the maths
Neednoggle
I once had a very intelligent chemistry prof who managed to explain it in such a way that for a brief, shining, roughly two hour period, I felt as though I actually understood the physical mechanism behind Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
Septcanmat
That one’s actually one of the easier ones to sort out; it’s really not as mysterious as people make it out to be. I like to start with a very familiar example when explaining it - motion blur in photography. Imagine you’re a sports photographer taking a picture of a pitcher throwing the baseball. You might use a slow shutter speed, and wind up with a picture of the baseball that’s just a streak. That photograph is giving you really poor data of where the ball was when, because you can’t really
Septcanmat
look at the picture and see ball, you see a smeared image of the ball. And because shutter speed was so long, you can’t say where the ball was in that particular “instant” because it’s actually many instances in time that the shutter was open for. But what you do get is information about the speed of the ball - you can tell that for the duration that the shutter was open, the ball was travelling at such a speed that it travelled such a distance to create the resulting blur. By contrast, you can
Septcanmat
take a photo with a very fast shutterspeed, and if you do that you can get a much clearer picture of the ball. Fast enough shutterspeed, and you can actually get an extremely clear picture of the ball… so clear it looks like it’s not even moving. But in that photo, you have far more precision with which you can say where the ball was and at exactly which time it was there. And that’s the key to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle - you can know where something is, or you can know fast it’s
Septcanmat
moving, but you can’t know both at the same time. Indeed, the more effort you put into knowing exactly one of those things, the less precision you can have on knowing the other thing. That’s fundamentally it. Now, there is a deeper layer of meaning to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which is that it’s not just that you can’t *know* those things simultaneously, but that they fundamentally cannot *coexist* - a high-momentum particle cannot be said to have a well-defined position in space,
Septcanmat
and vice versa. And that’s where I think a lot of people get lost, but that’s just because, I think, they get hung up on the idea of particles being like tiny little balls. A particle isn’t a ball. It also isn’t a wave. It’s its own thing with its own set of behaviours, and sometimes we can treat it like a ball and that will give the right answer and sometimes we treat it like a wave and that gives a good answer. So for the HUP, think about a particle as a wave, and think about the question of
theThousandHells
In the video game Planescape: Torment, there was a faction called the Sensates that were all about capturing experiences. Good, bad, whatever. They had a hall (museum?) where they kept orbs that magically stored experiences for others to enjoy. Whenever I read something like you wrote, I always think, 'that would make a fine sensate orb.'
Neednoggle
I like that! I wish I could recapture that moment in an orb
certainlynotaserialkiller
Anyone who claims to understand quantum theory is either lying or crazy
DukeDarkwood
OK, but according to quantum theory, doesn't that mean they could also be lying AND crazy? Is that how it works?
QBertSpuckler25
It's easy to understand...and then...it's VERY much not easy to understand.
Superchief86
Or... https://media0.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPWE1NzM3M2U1d3dnanl3MjVieGM3emkzdHZqYXVsN3Vjang2cWpkNjU4b2E5cWk2diZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/QiRKDptV3o47K/200w.webp
DrainingSideEffectsOfRestlessSleep
So a politician or insurance rep?
DorkJedi
I am studying Quantum Computing right now. Its good that I failed to understand Quantum Mechanics already, or this would be harder.
pictory
Hilarious! Thank you for the good laugh
Calajo
Yea I understand that I don't understand it. I'll stick to P-Chem.
StudioDerpster
Uh, half of p-chem is quantum mech, if I remember. I forgot the rest. Oh yeah, thermo.
TheMindEntropic
I keep feeling like I may be onto something. Seems I should keep it to myself.
astronomygeek7
Is it like staring into the abyss? Is this the class where you stare into the abyss and try to make sense of it? Is this why it waves back?
gardengnomeii
I sort of understood it when I was High AF one time.
StudioDerpster
I understood some of it, on a liitle boat just after a storm on the Mississippi river, when the sun came out and the schrooms kicked in. The air was calm and the waves big but "rounded", but the waves were all reflecting the sunlight and the crests were all clearly made of many, many smaller waves. I was like, "It's all waves, man!" The accumulated study of years came crashing together as I puffed on a swisher cigar, and I had a breif feeling of transendence and wonder.
abrazenfool
Schrödinger’s understanding
afatality
uhm, yes
TresusIbor
Maybe that's the trick. You have to be batshit insane to understand it D:
wobblecopterrrr
" we could all be in a turtles dream charlie!"...
SalmySwims
I think maybe 5 people in the history of humanity have *kind of* understood QM, and they'll probably all tell you they didn't.
FruitFlyInStrangePlaces
Quantum mechanics is like the NPCs in your dreams trying to figure out reality. It probably makes a lot of sense to people who aren't in it and experiencing it.
WhiskyTraveler
My wife used to teach quantum mechanics after getting her PhD. Showed her this video, she just said "yup."
Tigersterne
My dad was a Masters in physics. He says you have to take QM three times before you can act like you know what you're doing, even though you really don't.
certainlynotaserialkiller
doing that only results that you can say -with confidence- that you dont know how it works.
OhIfIMust
Photons be like
squillis
Until you measure it, then it's always been 1 thing
LiquorishSunfish
Like Americans finding they have a great great great grandmother who may have been indigenous and suddenly they're absolutely Native American.
MisterLemons
No fair! You changed the outcome by observing it!
Kablooeeey
I don't miss college exactly, but damn I miss being young and inquisitive and unburdened by the depressing realities of existence and believing I could do anything. The greatest people I know in my life are teachers, and so are some of the worst. A great teacher is one of the most valuable things you will ever meet in your life.
hyperchondriac
The most important thing I learned through college and real world is that I can NOT do anything. And most of that is because the people in power will prevent me from being able to.
netutoring
My time in college would have been greatly enhanced if I could have just gone and listened to them. That's all. Just listen and learn. Homework and papers and exams instead presented as... see if you can figure out this stuff. Explore it. Research it. If you feel led to. Some people enjoy challenges. Some people just want to listen. If you're there to learn it, maybe there's some assignments you HAVE to do for a degree. But others should be allowed to just be there:)
InkyBlinkyPinkyAndClyde
You can do that, it's called auditing. Audit comes from Latin "to hear", and that's all you do when you audit. It's often free, too, since they don't have to spend their time marking your work. You could look around at local institutions and see what they offer for auditing. Nowadays you can also basically do that online.
CarInAVet
I don't miss everything about college, but the things I do miss, I miss dearly. If I could live in a walkable community, spend 20 hours a week taking classes on whatever caught my fancy (without homework), and have the rest of my time free to do with as I pleased, I'd be pretty dang happy.
TheBraveCompanions
I miss having people who want to teach me things. I have some great mentors at my job, but man I wish I had paid more attention to world history in 10th grade. That stuff was so interesting!
shameofslate
I dropped out of college after freshman year and didn’t go back to school to finish my bachelor’s in liberal arts until 25 years later.
I found college much more rewarding the second time around. After having been out in the world for a while, and worked several different kinds of jobs, made new friends, had relationships both good and bad, etc. I was much better organized, and had a much deeper well of experience to draw from when it came to understanding things like literature and history.
Gibleteousjack
True. My kids are both rushing toward adulthood as quickly as they can. It's funny when we're young and naive we think that we can't wait to get out and do whatever we want when the truth is we're as free as we'll ever be. I turned 41 this year. I've got a bum leg and as much as I usually like my job I'm still beholden to my corporate overlords. College was basically the sweet spot for freedom, creativity, and hobbies.
MenloPart
How do I graduate?! I keep doing everything they demand and they just demand more!
FetteredJuvenescence
I miss believing that the world would get better.
marquettegoldeneagles
Youth is wasted on the young.
ADDGirl
Unfortunately I started college in 2001. We only had about 3 weeks of being unburdened by depressing reality.
InkyBlinkyPinkyAndClyde
I would have never left if I didn't have to work for a living. I loved school, I love learning. I love problem-solving so I likely would have ended up in a research dept. But I'd still wanna take classes, lol. If I was independently wealthy I'd have so many degrees!!!
GloveFullaVaseline
Yeah, me too.
Lampmonster
Same. I went back in my thirties and god what fun. Sure, there was some work, but I was used to busting my ass so I just got to love the learning and the environment and being around a bunch of inquisitive, open minded people.
NotSinceTheAccidend
People like you should be funded to go to school.
NotSinceTheAccidend
And idgaf if they’re not a prodigy genius. We have the means to do more, we just choose not to. For a specific purpose imo
InkyBlinkyPinkyAndClyde
I do get very high marks across the board, in STEM as well as "liberal arts" like english and philosophy. I got my electrical engineering degree and I was *one class* away from getting a Classics degree, which is what you get to do archaeology or other studies of ancient civilizations. I couldn't afford to stay another year to finish it though, and my course load from engineering was too high to fit another class in. But I'd have kept going, for sure. In both of those fields and more!!!
NotSinceTheAccidend
Just anyone who has such a thirst should have the opportunity. It isn’t easy to pass classes. I see no downside