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The Talk
- acqq 10y agoFor the first time viewers: don't miss to hover over the cartoon (or on the iOS, long press on the image): "Somewhere in the multiverse, there's a superior universe where all comics are this dorktastic." And the big red button at the end: "Out-nerd me now, Randall!" ---- And more to read: Scott Aaronson's "Making of The Talk": http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3058 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3058
- joatmon-snoo 10y agoYes! I actually lol'd when I saw the dig at xkcd!
- randallsquared 10y agoYeah, I pressed that button, as one does at the end of SMBC comics, and was momentarily very startled.
- mrfusion 10y agoI'd like to see more complex topics explained this way. Imagine an organic chemistry comic novel! I think people make a lot of topics seem way more complicated than they need to be, probably to make themselves feel important.
- proaralyst 10y agoIt might be deeper: if one has poor understanding of a subject, one will do a poor job of explaining it. I find that usually manifests in more complex explanations than otherwise, if only because I haven't yet figured out the general cases (and so must compensate with more exceptions).
- joaorico 10y agoIn that case, I recommend "The Manga Guide to ..." series. [1] I haven't read all of them, but they're a good attempt. (If you enjoy or can tolerate the quirkiness of japanese manga style.) Check out The Manga Guide to Databases https://smile.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Databases-Mana-Takahashi/dp/1593271905 https://smile.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Databases-Mana-Takahash... or The Manga Guide to Statistics https://smile.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Statistics-Shin-Takahashi/dp/1593271891/ https://smile.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Statistics-Shin-Takahas... or The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra https://smile.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Linear-Algebra/dp/1593274130/ https://smile.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Linear-Algebra/dp/15932... [1] https://www.nostarch.com/manga https://www.nostarch.com/manga From the top Amazon review on The Manga Guide to Databases: "STORY: A friend loaned me this book to show her, so I gave it to her and asked her to try it. If she read the first 10 pages and it was boring, she should stop. If she liked it, she could keep it until she was done. She opened it on the spot and was 20 pages in before she realized she still was standing in the middle of our kitchen. One day later, she was finished and said it was "cool" and that she liked it. I asked her if she learned anything or if it was just a story and she started talking. She said a little bit and talked about tables and how information is stored in columns and rows. She talked in a 9 year old's language and vocabulary, but basically explained to me the concept and benefits of centralized data stored in a single database. She made a couple other comments whose specifics I can't remember, but clearly articulated database ideas. It was somewhat surreal hearing these things come from a 3rd grader's mouth. She didn't feel like she had learned very much. I told her I probably could count on my fingers how many people at my work (300 people total - manufacturing industry, not IT) knew more about databases than she did, based on what she had finished telling me."
- charia 10y agoThanks for the links! I have to take Linear Algebra after this winter break and the manga guide to Linear Algebra looks like it could be a good primer to my course.
- joaorico 10y agoMake sure you pick up Axler's "Linear Algebra Done Right". It is my definite pick for someone entering the topic. And the second edition has a solutions manual floating around, which is very useful for practice (more importantly, every theorem proof in a math book is the solution to a practice problem...).
- phonon 10y agoAlso the LEX series, like https://amazon.com/What-Quantum-Mechanics-Physics-Adventure/dp/0964350440 https://amazon.com/What-Quantum-Mechanics-Physics-Adventure/...
- kenferry 10y agoThe Cartoon Guide to Genetics is terrific. I remember the material in there because it's presented so well.
- cschmidt 10y agoI'm a huge fan of the Cartoon Guide to Statistics. I imagine all Larry Gonick's books are worth a read: http://www.larrygonick.com/ http://www.larrygonick.com/
- geezerjay 10y ago> I'd like to see more complex topics explained this way. The rubber duck strikes again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
- ruffin 10y agoI really enjoy The Illustrated Guide to Law. http://lawcomic.net/guide/?page_id=5 http://lawcomic.net/guide/?page_id=5
- golergka 10y agoWhile I really enjoyed the comic, I don't think that it would actually explain anything to someone who had only been reading about quantum mechanics in some popular science articles.
- posterboy 10y agowell it explains something, but a comic only goes so far
- golergka 10y agoA comic can go a lot farther if it actually tries to explain things instead of joking. For example, interference can be easily explained in comic with waves drawn upon one another. However, I'm very glad that SMBC sticks to the wonderful humour and I certainly don't want the author to change the comic. Just take it for what it is: a humour for those who already know about the topic, and don't pretend it's educational.
- grabcocque 10y agoIt's a fact often established that people whose work is incomprehensible are held in high regard.
- grabcocque 10y agoThe even bigger problem is that current quantum computers, if indeed they are, are not heading down the universal quantum computer route, but instead heading down the route of adiabatic quantum annealing. I mean if you can explain that to your kids, could you explain it to me? I would take issue with various claims in the comic anway. The idea that quantum mechanics is a "generalisation of probability" is itself a simplification. The wave function can be used to derive the probability P=Ψ.Ψ*, but it's not probability per se. It does neatly encapsulate why the Copenhagen Interpretation of the wavefunction leads to a lot of magical thinking about what the wave function represents.
- tgb 10y agoThe co-author Scott Aaronson has a chapter in his lecture notes about that "suspect" subject which does a good job of motivating it: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html His whole book on the subject "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" is excellent and worth a read.
- adekok 10y ago(ex) Nuclear physicist here. I wish I had had this explanation at the start of my quantum mechanics courses.
- devilsavocado 10y agoFor a more in-depth, but still funny and entertaining, explanation of quantum computing check out 'Quantum Computing Since Democritus' by Scott Aaronson, the co-author of this comic.
- andrewclunn 10y agoOn the scale of, "Scientists keep their discoveries hidden," to, "Overly simplified explanations abound in order to 'popularize' science," we've definitely gone too far the other way. Of course the only remedy then is more precise explanation. Favorited.
- SamBam 10y agoHeh heh, I like the dig at Penrose at the end. (Only because I used to argue the exact same thing with my dad when I was a teen, and we had both read his books, and I have a human bias that when I read something that agrees with me, I smile, feel vindicated, and don't think about it further.)
- joaorico 10y agoScott has talked about Penrose's books and ideas several times, one of them in direct conversation with him: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756 http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec10.5.html http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec10.5.html
- iopq 10y agoI didn't understand any of that.
- dkonofalski 10y agoI understood some of those words. 5/5. Would read again.
- cm127 10y agoI'm starting to become skeptical of our understanding of quantum mechanics because we completely discredited a common theory with only one experiment over a hundred years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper... We never recreated the experiment again until Ernest Wilbur Silvertooth did about one-hundred years later in the 1980s. He found a possible connection to the Ether, but by this point every scientist in the world committed to thinking the opposite; they didn't care for his findings. People say GR works, but they keep running into weird situations where they have to keep fudging their mathematical models -- none of the equations work together, i.e. no unified field theory, -- and everyone is too afraid to suggest we've been approaching it all wrong. God, I love how political science has become: funding, faith, pride... The world didn't care for Galileo's theories, either: it turned their whole world upside-down.
- andylei 10y agothe article you linked says the experiment has been "repeated many times with increasing sensitivity" in the early 1900s
- cm127 10y agoThe point is so much of our conclusions are based off of these null hypothesis. It's like saying the iPhone will never succeed because so many other "smart" devices at the time were terrible.
- jcranmer 10y ago> The point is so much of our conclusions are based off of these null hypothesis. Quantum mechanics, special relativity, and general relativity (I'm not sure which ones you're objecting to here) all have strong predictive power. The fact that we can build extensions of these theories and see experimental validation of those theories is itself support for the underlying principles. With quantum mechanics, you can explain atomic spectra, crystal field splitting, aromaticity and antiaromaticity, vagaries of chemical bonding--and that's only in the domain of chemistry. Special relativity can also explain, say, why there is a stable Pb²⁺ ion.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWas that last frame a dig at Douglas Hofstadter? Zach, I think you may have finally surpassed Randall.
- mroll 10y agoNo, it's a dig at roger penrose
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago...Ah. I should have known.