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Comment by archgoon | Hacker News Reader

> "When I did organic chemistry, I spent 2 weeks immersing myself in the subject before making the first video"

I'm sorry, but 2 weeks is not that much time. Most TA's for ochem classes have at least taken 2 quarters (and yes, I can assure you, they also are 'immersed') of the subject, and they aren't in charge of the lecture.

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Meanwhile public school teachers teach math without understanding the subject at all, and we question whether or not Khan is doing a better job? I'm pretty sure he can do a better job than teachers regurgitating the textbook.

Can it be said that his organic chemistry lessons have suffered for this?

Honest question. I have not seen them and I am not in a position to evaluate them even if I had.

Organic Chemistry is not rocket science. I haven't seen those videos, but if they are introductory subjects, 2 immersed weeks sound about enough to me. I'll take a look at the videos today and see.

Actually, as documented in Ignition!, a great deal of rocket science is, in fact, chemistry — and although the oxidizers are not usually organic, the fuels are.

I would suggest that the chemistry parts of rocket science are some of the easier parts (how complicated can burning kerosene and LO2 be?), but I suspect I would piss off a few rocket scientists. ;)

Read Ignition!. It is, in fact, fairly difficult to find a combination of fuels that ignite exactly in the manner one wants them to, in a reasonable range of temperatures, and can be stored without decomposing or eating the storage container.

I think I will check that out. Thanks!

Of course, today, in large part thanks to a large number of people who died horrible deaths investigating this during the time period documented in Ignition!, it's not hard at all. But it was sure hard until the 1960s.

Apparently, it's not the complexity that kills you. It's the unexpected explosions (who knew titanium could be explosive?), the deadly poisons, and the times where you discover that the oxidizer tanks for all the rockets you manufactured seven years ago are leaking fuming nitric acid, and you haven't changed the design in seven years. The solution for that problem was truly astonishing.

Rocket science is not "rocket science". The expression has been coined as part of a propaganda campaign for the US public to accept a Nazi war criminal (Wernher von Braun) in an important post on the US government.

Maybe it's not "science", but it's horribly complicated, with then new vibration modes up the wazoo, and look up the fun efforts that were required to F1 engines for the first state of the Saturn V.

And look at how many still blow up or otherwise fail to put their payload in the desired orbit (although maybe in general we're getting better at that).

banana

We're done here.

I'm not a programmer. If I read a book on programming for two weeks, should I then teach the world how to program? Maybe, but I imagine HN would not necessarily agree...

Regardless of whether or not he should have thought it possible, he did it. That means that we have the luxury of evaluating his capability by evaluating the product instead of merely considering hypotheticals.

You can have as many theories as you want on this matter; I have many of my own. However I'm asking if anyone in a position to actually evaluate what he already did can tell us how well it worked.

Most TAs in organic chemistry classes aren't Salman Khan.

Even if they aren't perfect, it's better to have them on the web as a starting point. From there, KA can iterate and make them better.

But not everyone is a genius

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