No. I’m actually fairly certain I don’t understand Pauling’s work (not least because I haven’t read it!) and I’ll definitely want to have anything I write reviewed by an actual expert, but I do think I’d be able to explain what a “quantum number” really is to high school students in a way that makes more sense to them than my textbook did.
CronoDAS
Karma: 16,961
“Cardinality” is the math term you’re looking for.
If ten thousand people protest, sometimes they get massacred by the army.
Unfortunately the COVID response was more like those of incompetent movie institutions than what we the public ought to have gotten. And the US currently has a president that’s a cross between Al Bundy and Don Quixote.
I have a bone to pick with high school chemistry textbooks.
When I took chemistry in high school, there was a section of the textbook that described some features of quantum mechanics and tried to explain electron orbitals. The orbitals chapter in particular made basically no sense; I was able to extract enough out of it to be able to do the homework problems, but most of the class was totally lost. When I took a semester of modern physics in college (and also read Eliezer’s QM sequence), I learned that the reason the explanation made no sense was that it was entirely bullshit—among other things, it followed the usual route of describing the history of quantum mechanics and mistaking that for an actual explanation.
Is there an explanation for high school students that actually bites the bullet and says “This is the Schrodinger equation, which is what physicists eventually came up with to describe how subatomic particles actually behave. It’s advanced math and you don’t have to understand what it says, but here are some facts about it and what they mean for chemistry?” I’m annoyed enough with how awful my textbook was to actually write one myself, but I also don’t want to duplicate someone else’s work if there’s already a good explanation out there for high school chemistry teachers to use instead of the nonsense most textbooks have. Does anyone here know of one?
The idea being that, since Earth is possible, a spacially infinite universe could have an infinite number of Earths with humans on them, even if the Boltzmann Brain epoch is longer than the stellar epoch. It’s hard to compare infinities.
My dreaming brain isn’t entirely incapable of useful reasoning—sometimes I can recognize that I am dreaming and choose whether or not to wake up, although during a dream I also tend not to be capable of doing coherent reasoning for more than a short period of time.
If the universe is infinite, all types of Boltzmann Brain must be infinite in number. Since humans are finite in number, being even the absolute-least-probable type of BB would thus still be infinitely more likely than being a human brain.
If the universe is infinite, what stops the number of humans from also being infinite? (If you flip a coin infinity times, every finite Heads/Tails sequence will eventually appear as many times as you want to look for it, even if you do see “HHT” more frequently than you see “HTHTHT”.)
I do think that men underestimate the roles that things like fame play in their own attraction (would they be as eager to brag about having slept with a celebrity lookalike as they would about having slept with the actual celebrity?), but I’m also reasonably confident that a list of “female celebrities that heterosexual men would most want to have a one-night stand with” would differ a lot from a list of “female celebrities that homosexual women would most want to have a one-night stand with”.
Yep, I meant that as agreement rather than contrary evidence. (Unless I misread you—I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I posted that.)
How long would it have taken Socrates to learn “Don’t read the comments section”? ;)
I too used to see such women often, but I’m not a high school or college student anymore.
How many Danny DeVitos are there for each Roseanne Barr?
This is why one shouldn’t argue on the X-parrot, and why David Brin’s “disputation arenas” proposal includes a step in which each party must, to the satisfaction of the other and/or the judgea, explain the other side’s argument in their own words to prove that they actually understand it.
Does “centaur” Go play do any better than unassisted AI these days? Because there was that exploitable bug in the algorithms that Go neural networks learned to tell whether groups were alive or dead.
I think Plato’s surving writings contain a screed against written language, with one complaint being that you can’t argue with a textbook and get a response back the way you can with a human teacher.
Indeed. There’s a big difference between knowing how a problem could be solved and actually being able to solve it. Sometimes the former actually is enough, though.
The hard part of software engineering has always been figuring out the right requirements. Once you do that, writing source code is merely doing a particularly difficult type of compiling. ;)
Using a computer to learn Chess or Go is like using a calculator to help you learn arithmetic. You can check your answers, but you can’t directly see if your underlying algorithm for generating the answers is any good—it’s like a textbook that has the answers but not the solutions to problems in the back of the book.
Trying to say something like “the solutions to differential equations often include parameters that can take different integer values, and quantum numbers come from those parameters in (approximate?) solutions to the Schrodinger equation” in a way that makes sense to high school students seems difficult but not impossible, and I’m willing to at least try. 🤷♂️
And then I can get into the usual cookbook stuff that students would need to answer the homework problems at the end of the textbook chapter. (Also, unless I’m badly mistaken, almost nobody does chemistry by actually working directly with the Schrodinger equation.)