4 ms·

> Most simply, it [electron] just exists as a particular distribution of an electrostatic field in space. Best simple description of an electron I think I’ve h

> Most simply, it [electron] just exists as a particular distribution of an electrostatic field in space. Best simple description of an electron I think I’ve heard yet. I wish we would drop all the dumb analogies. From a kid’s perspective (at least what I can recall from high school), these macroscopic analogies mislead you into thinking the laws of physics work differently than what humanity’s best models of physics actually predict. For instance, I never liked the sense of “arbitrariness” I felt while learning about the periodic table in K-12 school. The diagonal rule. Hund’s rule. The exception to Hund’s rule. And so on. Don’t even get me started on organic chemistry. But if someone had told me “Forget about billiard balls and wave/particle duality. Our best models consists of solutions to simple and beautiful equations that are extremely difficult to solve”, then that would have made a lot more sense to me. The author of the article describes the truth as “weird math”. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Unitarity is aesthetic—it just “feels right”. The correspondence of atomic orbitals to irreducible representations of symmetry groups is beautiful. Why don’t we teach that to kids? You don’t have to go into the mathematical details of group theory, but just let them know these odd shapes originate from symmetry constraints. Much better than my reaction to seeing an illustration of a d_z^2 orbital in high school. I remember thinking “What the heck is that? This subject makes no sense.”

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
aeonik 2y ago
I agree that we should teach the quantum basis of things earlier. I just think a lot of people don't know it, and we don't have a good curriculum for kids to start with. We'd also need to revamp some of the math, chemistry, and physics curricula to build on the quantum basis of things.
fc417fc802 2y ago
> I wish we would drop all the dumb analogies. They're incredibly useful tools for thinking about things. You don't need or want QM to perform most reasoning tasks. Even MO is often overkill. I agree though that we should lead with the truth - that these models you're being taught are useful abstractions but ultimately wrong. That each successive model brings with it more accuracy and nuance but is more difficult to comprehend. A particular strength of that approach is that after making it to QM at the end it leaves you wondering what's next. It really drives home the point that the map is not the territory and that all we as humans can ever actually have is a succession of maps. > Forget about billiard balls and wave/particle duality. Actually that one is rather important. QM wave functions really do collapse. Things really do switch from behaving like a wave to behaving like a particle. This fact has significant effects on behavior. > these odd shapes originate from symmetry constraints Well they might fit those constraints, but can they really be said to originate from them? Is there actual cause and effect there? The answer to that would require understanding what gave rise to the phenomenon to begin with.
srean 2y ago
When I was taught the planetary model of atoms I was quite suspicious. My reaction was - you can't be serious ... to ... are you making fun of me ... to... just because you have a hammer ... Few years later orbitals were introduced as, essentially, motion blurs formed by our little zippy guy. I approached our teacher and asked what if that 'motion blur' is all there is and that billiards ball electron is just a bed-time story. That's an adequate way to think he said. Electron mass gets more difficult to explain to school kids in this line of thinking.
spacedcowboy 2y ago
All of education is “lies to children”. Those lies start off as brazen untruths, designed to get the basic concepts across, and then we, iteratively, make things more and more accurate as time goes by. Eventually, if you go far enough in a particular discipline, you’ll reach the boundary of our knowledge, and that’s when things start to get “fun”. I did a physics PhD. I still never got a really good answer to a question I asked in year-1 senior-school (11 years old, for non-Brits)… “What, exactly, is a positive charge ?” The waviness of the hands diminished over time, but it never really went away.
- eszed 2y ago
  The lie I was told: "it has more electrons than it can stably accommodate, so it will give some up to anything around that can accommodate more°". What's the next level where that breaks down? °Though the Benjamin-Franklin-reversed-the-signs thing I learned about for the first time up-thread has me thoroughly confused. Positive charge means it... Has fewer?
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  There is an old story I read years ago that went something like: When you are in grade school science you are told that a car can just be modeled as a cube. In high school you learn you can use 3 cubes. In college you learn you can do with hundreds of cubes. In post-doc you learn to do it billions of points with fractal levels of interaction. When writing the text book for grade school after years in physics academia, you write: "A car can be sufficiently modeled as a cube".
- trashtester 2y ago
  Asking what charge, momentum or energy (or other conserved quantities like QCD color) in Physics basically boils down to something that is invariant under some symmetry. Momentum and energy may feel more intuitive, but I'm not sure they really are, especially within QM. I'm not sure if we have any deeper explanations than these symmetries. Btw, questions formed like "What is X?" can have this kind of problem in any domain, especially if we expect some answer that is both intuitive and provides an essentialist explanation. For instance "What is consciousness?". "What is intelligence?", "What is the meaning of life?" What I've come to think, is that these questions come from the same type of mistake: As any Physicist would know, the world as described by Physics and the world as we intuitively start to understand it as small children are quite different, especially at scales far removed from our senses (like in QM or Cosmology). Humans simply doesn't have access to the full extent of reality, nor would our brains be able to do something useful with it if we had it, since we don't have anything near the processing power to comprehend it. What we're always stuck in, is an inner world model that is some kind of rough representation of the outside world. Now let's assume the outside world actually EXISTS, even if we don't know all that much about it. Physics is just a hint of this mismatch. If we simply let go of the assumption that there is a close correspondence between our internal model of the world and the actual world, we no longer have an obligation to form strict correspondences between object within our internal simplified simulation and the outside world. Now we're prepared for the next step: To understand that there probably is a REASON why we have this internal representation: It's there for evolutionary purposes. It helps us act in a world. Even for concepts that do not have a 1:1 correspondence with something in the Physical world, they may very well have correspondences to aspects of the world we're simply not able to comprehend otherwise. For instance, fully understanding what "consciousness" represents (how it emerges) may not even be possible without extreme amounts of computational power (the compute part may be irreducible). Concepts like charge are similar, except that we DO (through some advanced math) have some kind of ability to build mental models that DO (perhaps) capture what gives rise to it in the Physical world. But it still will not map onto our intuition in a way that give us the feeling of "understanding" what it "is". It kind of feels like "consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently large scale computational system that build world models that include themselves". Still doesn't correspond to how we "feel" that consciousness "is". But if we simply stop insisting on full correspondence between the intuitive representation of the world and the "real" (or rather, the one represented through accumulated scientific knowledge), but instead realize that the intuition MAY still be useful, we not only avoid stress related to the disconnect, we even allow ourselves to bring back concepts (like "free will") into our intuitive world model without worrying about whether it's "real". This provides two benefits: 1) We are "allowed" to use concepts that we know are not 100% accurate representations, and even have good reason to believe they're fairly useful simplifications of aspects of the world that ARE real, but too complex for us to grasp (like QM charge for a 5-year-old). 2) As opposed to idealists (who think the inner word is primary), we don't fall into the trap of applying those concepts out of context. Many idealist philosophies and ideologies can fail catastrophically by treating such simplified ideas as fundamental axioms from which they can deduce all sorts of absurdities.
FilosofumRex 2y ago
Like all simple description it's wrong. It [electron] is a quanta of the electron field which is a fermion matter (spin 1/2, therefore is charged) subject to the Pauli Exclusion principle. Electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental forces mediated by photons which are its basic quanta and is Bosonic field (spin 1) and therefore are neutral. The interaction of these two fields is depicted via Feynman diagrams. Macroscopically observed Electrostatic field of a charged capacitor, is mediated by the superposition of virtual zero frequency (ν = 0) photons, which are off-shell and non-radiative. Field’s energy arises from the cumulative effect of infinite virtual photon exchanges. Whether virtual photons are "real" is debatable and confuses those who prefer intuition to computation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

aeonik 2y ago

I agree that we should teach the quantum basis of things earlier. I just think a lot of people don't know it, and we don't have a good curriculum for kids to start with. We'd also need to revamp some of the math, chemistry, and physics curricula to build on the quantum basis of things.

fc417fc802 2y ago

> I wish we would drop all the dumb analogies. They're incredibly useful tools for thinking about things. You don't need or want QM to perform most reasoning tasks. Even MO is often overkill. I agree though that we should lead with the truth - that these models you're being taught are useful abstractions but ultimately wrong. That each successive model brings with it more accuracy and nuance but is more difficult to comprehend. A particular strength of that approach is that after making it to QM at the end it leaves you wondering what's next. It really drives home the point that the map is not the territory and that all we as humans can ever actually have is a succession of maps. > Forget about billiard balls and wave/particle duality. Actually that one is rather important. QM wave functions really do collapse. Things really do switch from behaving like a wave to behaving like a particle. This fact has significant effects on behavior. > these odd shapes originate from symmetry constraints Well they might fit those constraints, but can they really be said to originate from them? Is there actual cause and effect there? The answer to that would require understanding what gave rise to the phenomenon to begin with.

srean 2y ago

When I was taught the planetary model of atoms I was quite suspicious. My reaction was - you can't be serious ... to ... are you making fun of me ... to... just because you have a hammer ... Few years later orbitals were introduced as, essentially, motion blurs formed by our little zippy guy. I approached our teacher and asked what if that 'motion blur' is all there is and that billiards ball electron is just a bed-time story. That's an adequate way to think he said. Electron mass gets more difficult to explain to school kids in this line of thinking.

spacedcowboy 2y ago

All of education is “lies to children”. Those lies start off as brazen untruths, designed to get the basic concepts across, and then we, iteratively, make things more and more accurate as time goes by. Eventually, if you go far enough in a particular discipline, you’ll reach the boundary of our knowledge, and that’s when things start to get “fun”. I did a physics PhD. I still never got a really good answer to a question I asked in year-1 senior-school (11 years old, for non-Brits)… “What, exactly, is a positive charge ?” The waviness of the hands diminished over time, but it never really went away.

eszed 2y ago
The lie I was told: "it has more electrons than it can stably accommodate, so it will give some up to anything around that can accommodate more°". What's the next level where that breaks down? °Though the Benjamin-Franklin-reversed-the-signs thing I learned about for the first time up-thread has me thoroughly confused. Positive charge means it... Has fewer?
Workaccount2 2y ago
There is an old story I read years ago that went something like: When you are in grade school science you are told that a car can just be modeled as a cube. In high school you learn you can use 3 cubes. In college you learn you can do with hundreds of cubes. In post-doc you learn to do it billions of points with fractal levels of interaction. When writing the text book for grade school after years in physics academia, you write: "A car can be sufficiently modeled as a cube".
trashtester 2y ago
Asking what charge, momentum or energy (or other conserved quantities like QCD color) in Physics basically boils down to something that is invariant under some symmetry. Momentum and energy may feel more intuitive, but I'm not sure they really are, especially within QM. I'm not sure if we have any deeper explanations than these symmetries. Btw, questions formed like "What is X?" can have this kind of problem in any domain, especially if we expect some answer that is both intuitive and provides an essentialist explanation. For instance "What is consciousness?". "What is intelligence?", "What is the meaning of life?" What I've come to think, is that these questions come from the same type of mistake: As any Physicist would know, the world as described by Physics and the world as we intuitively start to understand it as small children are quite different, especially at scales far removed from our senses (like in QM or Cosmology). Humans simply doesn't have access to the full extent of reality, nor would our brains be able to do something useful with it if we had it, since we don't have anything near the processing power to comprehend it. What we're always stuck in, is an inner world model that is some kind of rough representation of the outside world. Now let's assume the outside world actually EXISTS, even if we don't know all that much about it. Physics is just a hint of this mismatch. If we simply let go of the assumption that there is a close correspondence between our internal model of the world and the actual world, we no longer have an obligation to form strict correspondences between object within our internal simplified simulation and the outside world. Now we're prepared for the next step: To understand that there probably is a REASON why we have this internal representation: It's there for evolutionary purposes. It helps us act in a world. Even for concepts that do not have a 1:1 correspondence with something in the Physical world, they may very well have correspondences to aspects of the world we're simply not able to comprehend otherwise. For instance, fully understanding what "consciousness" represents (how it emerges) may not even be possible without extreme amounts of computational power (the compute part may be irreducible). Concepts like charge are similar, except that we DO (through some advanced math) have some kind of ability to build mental models that DO (perhaps) capture what gives rise to it in the Physical world. But it still will not map onto our intuition in a way that give us the feeling of "understanding" what it "is". It kind of feels like "consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently large scale computational system that build world models that include themselves". Still doesn't correspond to how we "feel" that consciousness "is". But if we simply stop insisting on full correspondence between the intuitive representation of the world and the "real" (or rather, the one represented through accumulated scientific knowledge), but instead realize that the intuition MAY still be useful, we not only avoid stress related to the disconnect, we even allow ourselves to bring back concepts (like "free will") into our intuitive world model without worrying about whether it's "real". This provides two benefits: 1) We are "allowed" to use concepts that we know are not 100% accurate representations, and even have good reason to believe they're fairly useful simplifications of aspects of the world that ARE real, but too complex for us to grasp (like QM charge for a 5-year-old). 2) As opposed to idealists (who think the inner word is primary), we don't fall into the trap of applying those concepts out of context. Many idealist philosophies and ideologies can fail catastrophically by treating such simplified ideas as fundamental axioms from which they can deduce all sorts of absurdities.

FilosofumRex 2y ago

Like all simple description it's wrong. It [electron] is a quanta of the electron field which is a fermion matter (spin 1/2, therefore is charged) subject to the Pauli Exclusion principle. Electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental forces mediated by photons which are its basic quanta and is Bosonic field (spin 1) and therefore are neutral. The interaction of these two fields is depicted via Feynman diagrams. Macroscopically observed Electrostatic field of a charged capacitor, is mediated by the superposition of virtual zero frequency (ν = 0) photons, which are off-shell and non-radiative. Field’s energy arises from the cumulative effect of infinite virtual photon exchanges. Whether virtual photons are "real" is debatable and confuses those who prefer intuition to computation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle