| I just wanted to chime back in here and say that I am finding this discussion absolutely fascinating and enlightening. This is HN at its best. Thank you. FWIW, as someone who is interested in science pedagogy, and specifically as someone who actively engages with anti-science propaganda like young-earth creationism, I want to contribute this: > In my opinion knowing how to use the Schrodinger equation to get the "spectrum of the hydrogen atom" is essentially a matter of historical interest but really not relevant to understanding things. IMHO this is more than historical interest. It's a dramatic illustration of how science actually works, and specifically, that it does not rely on any appeal to authority, despite the superficial appearance of occasionally hearing people say things like, "Einstein teaches us that X" with the implication that X is therefore unquestionable gospel because Einstein said it. Here is an example of a calculation that anyone can do (with enough effort) and compare to the results of experiments that they can likewise do themselves (with enough effort). Of course, most people won't bother to put in this effort, but just knowing that they could if they wanted to is very powerful because it provides an actual reason why other people's results are generally trustworthy: even if you don't do the experiment, someone else might, and if the result turns out to be wrong then it will eventually be called out. Also... > this approach emphatically does not generalise to more complicated systems This is spot on. Speaking from first-hand experience of my own intellectual journey into QM, focusing on single-particle systems and slogans like "any attempt to measure the position of the particle destroys the interference in the two-slit experiment" is extremely misleading. It leads to conceptual dead-ends that make it much harder to wrap your brain around entanglement than it should be. IMHO, QM pedagogy should start with entanglement and decoherence. In this respect, I think Aaronson gets it right. But mainly I just wanted to thank you both for the privilege of being a fly on the wall while you discuss these things. It has generated a long reading list for me. |