Hacker News Reader

I follow that one can quickly get on-track with this mode of explaining nature, but I still think the rigamarole of dragging students through all the meaningful discoveries since Galileo is useful since understanding the techniques that have been used to imagine those systems of explanation is pretty interesting, if not broadly applicable.

It's naive to think this was the last mystery.

View on HN

Agreed. Also, there are not "two ways to teach quantum mechanics".

For example, take the hugely popular book of Griffiths: if I remember correctly, equation 1.1 is just the time-dependent Schrodinger equation.

From what I have seen, most teachers do not spend too long on the history of quantum mechanics but they do focus more on the physics of quantum mechanics that this introduction does. The difference is important, and completely ignored in the first paragraph of the linked article.

The more I work in science, the more I go back to the period from slightly before the industrial revolution- the 1750s or so- ending at the beginning of WWII.

Each time I go back I understand just a little bit more about how we got to where we were in 1938. Or how we got to the point that freshman physics students can build a michelson morely interferometer in an afternoon on a benchtop when the original required heroic efforts including a pool of mercury.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com