4 ms·

If you use a different definition of higher education -- not as a college degree but truly incredible learning on a variety of topics, I think the disruption ha

• analog31 4y ago
  How good are you at solving moderately difficult quantum mechanics problems? Maybe you're the exception, but when I meet people who've learned quantum mechanics from books, they've soaked up all the cool weird stuff, but can't write an equation. Disclosure: I don't know how I would have learned physics without classroom instruction. I was viscerally interested in it, and in math, but didn't have the self discipline to do the work without some guidance.
  • bigger_cheese 4y ago
    I have a Materials Engineering degree. In my 4th and final year I decided to pick "Solid State Physics" as an elective, it was a 3rd year course taught by the physics faculty it had no prerequisites listed and sounded like it was an interesting subject. I was the only non physics student in the course and I remember sitting in the first lecture as the lecturer spoke a million miles an hour about Hamiltonians, Wave Functions and Fermi-Dirac Statistics. Almost everything he spoke about sounded like a completely different language to me and everyone else was nodding along to everything he was saying. I felt so lost. I somehow scraped a pass but in the process had to teach myself the prior assumed physics knowledge in order to do so. I would not recommend.