[fizixer]

I'm sorry I can't take Susan Fowler seriously. She claims she went from zero math knowledge (besides sixth grade) and a philosophy major to studying quantum field theory in a span of something like a year and a half [0].

If this wasn't horsesh*t to begin with, she went on to work in non-physics areas after graduation, and never did any research work in physics (no grad school either).

How convenient.

(likely explanation: either her undergrad program was super lax, passing pretty much everyone who shows up in class and exams, hence useless for a serious career in physics, or she's misrepresenting her background)

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170314073043/https://fledgling...

[knzhou]

Well, I've read almost all the books she lists and I've been a quantum field theory practitioner for years, and I can at least attest the list is good. People actually learn from these books.

I think your comment also directly illustrates what I was complaining about. You really shouldn't source learning recommendations from the highest ranking people, because these people know the least about what it's like to learn something anew. A Nobel prize doesn't automatically make somebody a good teacher.

[mnky9800n]

Carl Weiman would like to have a word with you. Ahahaa.

[jimhefferon]

Not GP but if you mean that

> A Nobel prize doesn't automatically make somebody a good teacher.

is mistaken by pointing to Weiman, could you elaborate on that, please?

[mnky9800n]

Carl took his nobel money for BEC and started a career in education and education research.

[jimhefferon]

Sure, he is admirable that way. But the comment says not necessarily, which is not a throwaway. Personally, it seems to me that being good at teaching is at the least independent of being a good researcher, if not perhaps negatively correlated. That very much does not rule out extraordinary exceptions (ones that deserve a great deal of attention, for sure).

[mnky9800n]

I just think they are not correlated. Both require you to put effort into being good at it. They also require you to have a firm grasp of the source material.

[blueblimp]

It's believable to me that a smart+motivated person whose reason for not knowing much math is lack of formal education could catch up a lot faster than you might expect. Educational pacing is generally designed for people who aren't smart and aren't motivated, so if you're both, you can go much faster.

Additionally, she was doing this at around 22 years old, which is in the age range that your brain reaches its optimum performance at learning new things.

She also wasn't starting from sixth grade math knowledge, more like spotty knowledge: she says she had learned some logic, algebra, and set theory.

It's annoying that she characterizes herself as a person who isn't smart/mathy/etc., when her story implies she has plenty of talent for it and just lacked the formal education. The vast majority of people do get a public school education or equivalent, and if they consider themselves bad at math, it's because they were having trouble learning it. If anything the story just demonstrates the dominance of talent+motivation over amount of educational background.

Edit: To elaborate, she says she expected math to be difficult because "I had heard throughout my life that math and physics were really difficult", not because she wasn't able to do well in her math classes. She says "I had the most difficult time possible taking intro physics and the beginning calculus courses", and yeah it's going to be challenging and a lot of work, but she doesn't say her grades came out bad in the end. The takeaway _should_ be that you need to be careful with second-hand opinions about what's difficult, because people vary so much in their aptitudes and interests.

[whatshisface]

Well, there's "learn" and then there's "Learn." One of my undergraduate QFT courses was taught by a nuclear physicist who wanted to spend the whole time talking about nuclear shells and mass gaps, so he crammed all the QFT in to the last half of the semester. In a blaze of glory, we ran though a bunch of linear algebra, got showed how to do Feynman diagrams and compute cross sections, and saw some vacuum solutions for the Dirac equation. After taking that class, I wouldn't say I knew QFT, but I could say I knew QFT without lying.

If you taught someone how to do derivatives in a half-semester blaze of glory like that, I bet you could combine it with the half-semester blaze of QFT glory to technically qualify as teaching a high school student QFT in half a year.

(I don't regret the professor's decision at all, by the way, I liked the nuclear stuff.)

[naveen99]

Barton Zwiebach makes quantum mechanics pretty accessible https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9d...

[tus88]

There is a sort of qualitative approach to QFD that can abstract away the difficult math and become a sort of kids geometry game.

It's a little bit like programming Arduino using the high level scripting language and thinking your a hardware hack0r.