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Richard Feynman having the quantum Hall effect on his "to learn" list is amazing. I mean, it makes sense, because less than three years before he died the Nobel
by sigmoid10 2y ago
Richard Feynman having the quantum Hall effect on his "to learn" list is amazing. I mean, it makes sense, because less than three years before he died the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for its discovery. But it shows that even one of the greatest physicists of his generation had not fully grasped something that is now part of every undergraduate physics degree's standard curriculum and is arguably much less complicated than, say, Feynman's contributions to Quantum Electrodynamics.
- mkagenius 2y agoBeing part of a course doesn't mean the students get enough time to delve as deep or have as deep an understanding of the phenomenon though.
- ddtaylor 2y agoI agree. Someone might be able to understand and reproduce some basic components of the system in the same way I use mathematics effectively, but to say I have an understanding of the fundamentals at any level like Wolfram does.
- asdff 2y agoYeah, imagine if the undergrads had to write out the underlying proof. When I took physics classes the professors would do things for our exams like assume gravity is 10 ms to give people an easier time with the numbers, and of course the spherical frictionless cow.
- WalterBright 2y agoI especially liked the pointless masses.
- spoonfeeder006 2y agoMaybe has more to do with volume of information rather than it being especially difficult for him? Could be that was his week's todo list
- gmueckl 2y agoEven the greatest of us are only human. Also, the way many discoveries are explained in a course is usually very streamlined compared to the papers that present them initially and defend them in detail on a limited number of pages.
- wildzzz 2y agoWatching the most brilliant professors struggle to convert a word doc to PDF highlights that exact same phenomenon.
- spoonfeeder006 2y agoMy CS professor in grad school was once struggling to set up a classic analog overhead projector, so I taunted him about it: "sooo, you can debug 1M lines of C code, but you can't...."
- painted-now 2y agoI think there is some huge difference between learning some bleeding edge ideas vs stuff that -for years - has been repackaged, processed, and optimized for being taught and for making exams out of it.
- sigmoid10 2y agoThe thing is, most of Feynman's work (in particular the stuff he received the Nobel prize for) has not really made it into undergraduate courses, despite being decades older and going through a lot more repackaging and processing. But the quantum hall effect is so simple by comparison that it is taught in early QM courses. So the key takeaway here is that there were still pretty low hanging fruits in physics two decades after Feynman won the Nobel.