[gus_massa]

These theories have a very precise mathematical formulation and very weird unintuitive consequences. If you try to teach them without math, you only keep the weird unintuitive part and it's more unintelligible.

For quantum mechanics you have to know eigenvalues and eigenvectors. This is studies in the first years of the university in a technical career. I'm not sure if it can be teach much earlier.

For Special Relativity you have to know Minkowsky spaces. It's not so difficult, it can be moved to the first years of the university.

For General Relativity you have to know curved spaces. It's not imposible to learn, but you can get a Ph.D. in Math or Physics without studding curved spaces.

[whatshisface]

Linear algebra (with diagonalization not just using gauss-jordan) could be pushed back to highschool for motivated students, and is in some countries. The coordinate system aspect of special relativity (the origin of time dilation and most of its "weird effects") only requires algebra. General relativity requires the full mechanisms of differential geometry but advances in things like differential forms are pushing this back to the undergraduate level. Overall I would say that it could be done but you would have to leave the unmotivated students behind.

[abecedarius]

Turtle Geometry gets as far as motion in curved spacetime using code in Logo. Dunno how many high schoolers have ever learned from it, but it's there. (It includes a nice concrete intro to vector algebra earlier, too.)

Re quantum mechanics without many prerequisites, I'm a fan of Feynman's book QED.

[shuspect]

We can keep math, but switch to better theories, with plausible explanations.

A kind of Pilot Wave can explain quantum weirdness to layman people with ease.

We can ditch theory relativity and calculate speeds relatively to CMB, which is much easier to understand.

We can ditch Big Bang theory and, instead, accept that light is not immortal, because it ages with time. IMHO, Dipole Repeller and Shapley Attractor are much more attractive and easier to explain than Big Bang.

[krastanov]

All three examples you gave have problems or inconsistencies and this is why they are not used. You are being downvoted because you are suggesting teaching formalisms that are known to be insufficient simply because they fulfill your personal criteria of intuitiveness.

[shpeedy]

We have no perfect theory to explain everything, so it's just tradeoff, exchange of one set of inconsistencies for another set of inconsistencies, but with better intuition. I'm doing it here, in my country.

The problem with current theories is that I understand them when I reading them. It's like piece of complex code or book with complex but boring text, like phonebook. I can follow it, when I read it, but I cannot reproduce it when book is closed.

Can we teach a phonebook to kids? Yep. Is it useful? Nope.

Recently, I did "quantum physics in one picture" experiment. Results are very good: lots of reposts, comments, interest in topic.

[krastanov]

But it is not a tradeoff in the cases you picked, rather one set of formalisms has drastically more inconsistencies than the other. E.g. pilot waves: you gain having real numbers (which I personally see little value in) and you gain having a more mechanistic intuitive source of the interference (which is indeed interesting). However describing multiple interacting entangled particles becomes incredibly difficult, describing annihilation and second quantization which is needed for the quantum behavior of fields is not completely done yet, and (what I consider the most substantial problem) you can not work with finite level systems (i.e. anything but a spinless particle in a box is very difficult to describe by pilot wave theory).

In short, pilot waves were a worthwhile avenue of research, but we have seen they are incredibly cumbersome or even insufficient in many quantum mechanics problems.

[shpeedy]

Yep. Pilot Wave theory is underdeveloped theory, but it helps to develop intuition. Walking droplets are even better for that. IMHO, it's better to use QM to solve QM problems in science, but use walking droplets and Pilot Wave Theory to develop intuition for others. Walking droplets are easy to demonstrate. Double slit experiment can be reproduced in school lab. This way, quantum physics can be taught in school for children of age 12+, so they will be ready to solve much more complex problems when they will be PhD.

Entanglement is hard problem for PWT. Photos of entangled photons[0] are intriguing, because they look similar to behavior of walking droplets in some experiments (see dotwave.org feed). I hope, someone will be able to reproduce entanglement in macro. Currently, my top priority is to reproduce Stern–Gerlach experiment in macro (I suspect that interference between external field and particle wave creates channel, which guides particle into spot, but it better to see it once). Second priority is creation of "photons" in macro. Entanglement will be third. IMHO, all of them require microgravity to reproduce in 3D.

[0]: https://phys.org/news/2019-07-scientists-unveil-first-ever-i...

[krastanov]

With some caveats, I happily agree with the angle from this last comment! I agree PWT is a great way to get people hooked on quantum science, even if I consider it as a dead end for fixing the inconsistencies we have (semi-personal semi-professional opinion).