7 ms·

Going meta here, speaking from the perspective of a software engineer with a great interest for physics. There are a lot of terms I do not fully understand in

Going meta here, speaking from the perspective of a software engineer with a great interest for physics. There are a lot of terms I do not fully understand in this article. Can you recommend an application that would allow me to select for example the words "distant particles can be correlated in ways that are impossible for classical objects" and find out what lead to that discovery? Or what does "Bell inequality" really mean? If not, are there recommended methods of understanding articles better? I am thinking of this process: - copy the article to a document - find any words or sentences that you would like to understand better, highlight them in some colour e.g. red - do some googling / wiki surfing or ask in HN or some kind of forums about them - add sections after the paragraphs with highlights to explain the words or sentences - recursion - once satisfied, highlight the words in a different colour?

NikolaeVarius 10y ago
Highlight and google search? There are already addons that highlight words and provide the definition aka Google Dictionary
- toxicFork 10y ago
  Yes it's likely that I'm over-thinking this... It does not feel good enough since it would be ~opening new tabs and~ make me go through a lot more effort than necessary, and it feels like I would be overwhelmed and give up eventually. If there is something that would make "understanding articles as easy as possible" then that would be amazing. I'll probably end up developing this myself... Edit: was incorrect about opening new tabs
  - ams6110 10y ago
    There's no magic to learning. It takes some effort on your part.
  - ccvannorman 10y ago
    I was thinking a Chrome extension to automate this process would be a great way to turn "inaccessible science gibberish" into "Eli5" for a mass of people (I'd like to read that but I'm not willing to do any work other than install a Chrome xtension)
    - throwaway7645 10y ago
      Not sure if that would really work. Understanding science, math, and engineering using analogies leads to misconceptions when one tries to apply them. The math is true understanding. If you understand the equation, then you not only understand the subject, but often what would happen if you tweaked the inputs...etc. Although it would be nice if Wikipedia had an ELI5 section on its physics articles to go through first, so I agree with you there.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >It does not feel good enough since it would be ~opening new tabs and~ make me go through a lot more effort than necessary While you don't need new tabs to google a term with some addons, actual knowledge of the subject, even at a basic level, takes a lot more effort than opening tabs. There's no magic bullet to learning.
coldtea 10y ago
>Can you recommend an application that would allow me to select for example the words "distant particles can be correlated in ways that are impossible for classical objects" and find out what lead to that discovery? Or what does "Bell inequality" really mean? If not, are there recommended methods of understanding articles better? Venkman: Ray, pretend for a moment that I don't know anything about metallurgy, engineering, or physics, and just tell me what the hell is going on. Stantz: You never studied. (Ghostbusters) Just studying the principles -- e.g. reading an entry level Physics/QM book, would be better and more solid than surfing around, or asking for opinions on forums (which you couldn't evaluate anyway -- tons of bogus opinions in any kind of forum), or googling stuff. Stuff like "Bell's inequality" are so basic that merely surfing and skimming wouldn't help (it would be all a kind of concept soup in the end). You can do that with more advanced notions.
- Roritharr 10y ago
  Can you recommend an entry level Physics/QM book?
  - coldtea 10y ago
    The Feynman Lectures on Physics are not half bad.
  - 21 10y ago
    You can also look at some Susskind talks. He is a very good explainer. They don't skim on the math, but it's followable for somebody with a high-school level of math, at least for the basic concepts like spin or bell inequality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyX8kQ-JzHI&list=PLQrxduI9Pds1fm91Dmn8x1lo-O_kpZGk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyX8kQ-JzHI&list=PLQrxduI9Pd...
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      he also did a small book on QM called "the theoretical minimum" IIRC
    - wernercd 10y ago
21 10y ago
> what does "Bell inequality" really mean Some stuff is just hard to understand. You can make analogies, like talking about two people hiding a colored ball in their hand and one of them showing it later, but these are not truly helpful in really understanding the issue. For that you need a bit of math. One physicist explained this really nicely, saying that because we live in the macroscopic world we have a certain kind of experience of it, and our gut feelings and intuitions are just wrong when applied to the microscopic world, and using math is just a way of avoiding these misconceptions, and after a while of doing that you will get a new "math intuition" of physics.
- roywiggins 10y ago
  Our intuitions about macro stuff is really bad, or at least the intuition of people not steeped in Newtonian mechanics is really bad. Gallilean relativity is deeply unintuitive to many physics-naive people, let alone Newtonian mechanics. There's a reason Aristotelian mechanics lasted so long (okay, also the lack of a real scientific method, but still). To demonstrate, ask a random person these questions: If I stand on an airplane and jump, do I land where I started, further back, or further forward, relative to the plane? if I whirl a ball on a string clockwise around my head and let go, does (neglecting vertical motion) the ball travel A) curving counterclockwise B) curving clockwise C) in a straight line
  - hutzlibu 10y ago
    "If I stand on an airplane and jump, do I land where I started, further back, or further forward, relative to the plane?" I would say, that most people would answer correctly, that you would not land on the same place, but probably be blown away far backwards from air friction (even though they would just call it wind).
    - roywiggins 10y ago
      I was imprecise: I'm not talking wing-walkers, I mean standing inside a plane, where wind is hopefully nonexistent
ENGNR 10y ago
I'm in the same boat as you, but started looking a while ago when quantum computers started showing promise. I found: - PBS Spacetime on YouTube is awesome - Check out the double split experiment. It seems simple, but when you think about what getting interference patterns when only sending one particle at a time really means.. - Then when ready, the quantum eraser - Bells inequality is a simple idea that proved the strange interpretation of the double split experiment was true, rather than a more mundane interpretation
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  If you like the double slit experiment, you'll probably like Feynmann's "motivation" of the path integral in quantum field theory: Suppose you take the double slit (plate with two holes in it), and you start adding more holes. Of course the particle will go through all of them, but with less probability the further they are off-axis. We can also add more than one plate, and the particle will go through all possible combinations of holes with some probability. Now suppose we let the number of plates go to infinity, and then let the number of holes in each plate go to infinity. The particle still goes through all of the infinite combinations of holes, with less probability if the path is unlikely. But really, there is nothing left anymore between the particle source and the screen! There is just free space! So this path integral with the particle going sort-of-everyhere weighted by probability actually describes propagation through free space.
  - zeroer 10y ago
    That connection between slits in the infinite limit and path integrals is really fascinating. I've read of lot of Feynman, but never that. Where does he talk about it?
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      I'm actually not sure, off the top of my head, but I think it's from his book "Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals"; he also used it in lectures IIRC.
- 10y ago
empath75 10y ago
Do you have a few hundred spare hours? Leonard Susskind did an extensive series of lectures, that assumes some familiarity with Calculus and linear algebra, but almost nothing else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJfw6lDlTuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJfw6lDlTuA

NikolaeVarius 10y ago

Highlight and google search? There are already addons that highlight words and provide the definition aka Google Dictionary

toxicFork 10y ago
Yes it's likely that I'm over-thinking this... It does not feel good enough since it would be ~opening new tabs and~ make me go through a lot more effort than necessary, and it feels like I would be overwhelmed and give up eventually. If there is something that would make "understanding articles as easy as possible" then that would be amazing. I'll probably end up developing this myself... Edit: was incorrect about opening new tabs
- ams6110 10y ago
  There's no magic to learning. It takes some effort on your part.
- ccvannorman 10y ago
  I was thinking a Chrome extension to automate this process would be a great way to turn "inaccessible science gibberish" into "Eli5" for a mass of people (I'd like to read that but I'm not willing to do any work other than install a Chrome xtension)
  - throwaway7645 10y ago
    Not sure if that would really work. Understanding science, math, and engineering using analogies leads to misconceptions when one tries to apply them. The math is true understanding. If you understand the equation, then you not only understand the subject, but often what would happen if you tweaked the inputs...etc. Although it would be nice if Wikipedia had an ELI5 section on its physics articles to go through first, so I agree with you there.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >It does not feel good enough since it would be ~opening new tabs and~ make me go through a lot more effort than necessary While you don't need new tabs to google a term with some addons, actual knowledge of the subject, even at a basic level, takes a lot more effort than opening tabs. There's no magic bullet to learning.

coldtea 10y ago

>Can you recommend an application that would allow me to select for example the words "distant particles can be correlated in ways that are impossible for classical objects" and find out what lead to that discovery? Or what does "Bell inequality" really mean? If not, are there recommended methods of understanding articles better? Venkman: Ray, pretend for a moment that I don't know anything about metallurgy, engineering, or physics, and just tell me what the hell is going on. Stantz: You never studied. (Ghostbusters) Just studying the principles -- e.g. reading an entry level Physics/QM book, would be better and more solid than surfing around, or asking for opinions on forums (which you couldn't evaluate anyway -- tons of bogus opinions in any kind of forum), or googling stuff. Stuff like "Bell's inequality" are so basic that merely surfing and skimming wouldn't help (it would be all a kind of concept soup in the end). You can do that with more advanced notions.

Roritharr 10y ago
Can you recommend an entry level Physics/QM book?
- coldtea 10y ago
  The Feynman Lectures on Physics are not half bad.
- 21 10y ago
  You can also look at some Susskind talks. He is a very good explainer. They don't skim on the math, but it's followable for somebody with a high-school level of math, at least for the basic concepts like spin or bell inequality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyX8kQ-JzHI&list=PLQrxduI9Pds1fm91Dmn8x1lo-O_kpZGk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyX8kQ-JzHI&list=PLQrxduI9Pd...
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    he also did a small book on QM called "the theoretical minimum" IIRC
  - wernercd 10y ago

21 10y ago

> what does "Bell inequality" really mean Some stuff is just hard to understand. You can make analogies, like talking about two people hiding a colored ball in their hand and one of them showing it later, but these are not truly helpful in really understanding the issue. For that you need a bit of math. One physicist explained this really nicely, saying that because we live in the macroscopic world we have a certain kind of experience of it, and our gut feelings and intuitions are just wrong when applied to the microscopic world, and using math is just a way of avoiding these misconceptions, and after a while of doing that you will get a new "math intuition" of physics.

roywiggins 10y ago
Our intuitions about macro stuff is really bad, or at least the intuition of people not steeped in Newtonian mechanics is really bad. Gallilean relativity is deeply unintuitive to many physics-naive people, let alone Newtonian mechanics. There's a reason Aristotelian mechanics lasted so long (okay, also the lack of a real scientific method, but still). To demonstrate, ask a random person these questions: If I stand on an airplane and jump, do I land where I started, further back, or further forward, relative to the plane? if I whirl a ball on a string clockwise around my head and let go, does (neglecting vertical motion) the ball travel A) curving counterclockwise B) curving clockwise C) in a straight line
- hutzlibu 10y ago
  "If I stand on an airplane and jump, do I land where I started, further back, or further forward, relative to the plane?" I would say, that most people would answer correctly, that you would not land on the same place, but probably be blown away far backwards from air friction (even though they would just call it wind).
  - roywiggins 10y ago
    I was imprecise: I'm not talking wing-walkers, I mean standing inside a plane, where wind is hopefully nonexistent

ENGNR 10y ago

I'm in the same boat as you, but started looking a while ago when quantum computers started showing promise. I found: - PBS Spacetime on YouTube is awesome - Check out the double split experiment. It seems simple, but when you think about what getting interference patterns when only sending one particle at a time really means.. - Then when ready, the quantum eraser - Bells inequality is a simple idea that proved the strange interpretation of the double split experiment was true, rather than a more mundane interpretation

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
If you like the double slit experiment, you'll probably like Feynmann's "motivation" of the path integral in quantum field theory: Suppose you take the double slit (plate with two holes in it), and you start adding more holes. Of course the particle will go through all of them, but with less probability the further they are off-axis. We can also add more than one plate, and the particle will go through all possible combinations of holes with some probability. Now suppose we let the number of plates go to infinity, and then let the number of holes in each plate go to infinity. The particle still goes through all of the infinite combinations of holes, with less probability if the path is unlikely. But really, there is nothing left anymore between the particle source and the screen! There is just free space! So this path integral with the particle going sort-of-everyhere weighted by probability actually describes propagation through free space.
- zeroer 10y ago
  That connection between slits in the infinite limit and path integrals is really fascinating. I've read of lot of Feynman, but never that. Where does he talk about it?
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    I'm actually not sure, off the top of my head, but I think it's from his book "Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals"; he also used it in lectures IIRC.
10y ago

empath75 10y ago

Do you have a few hundred spare hours? Leonard Susskind did an extensive series of lectures, that assumes some familiarity with Calculus and linear algebra, but almost nothing else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJfw6lDlTuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJfw6lDlTuA