{"id":9286,"date":"2019-04-01T06:00:01","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T14:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=9286"},"modified":"2019-04-01T06:49:38","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T14:49:38","slug":"qm-intro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/01\/qm-intro\/","title":{"rendered":"New Ultralearning Project: Let\u2019s Learn Quantum Mechanics"},"content":{"rendered":"

A subject that has always confused and fascinated me was physics. When I was in high-school, I liked to read popular physics books like Brian Greene\u2019s The Elegant Universe<\/a> or Stephen Hawking\u2019s A Brief History of Time<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The picture these books painted was a bizarre world. Space is a fabric. Time curves. Stuff is like a wave\u2014except when we\u2019re looking at where it goes, in which case it turns back into particles. The details are so strange they would be unbelievable as science fiction if they weren\u2019t scientific fact.<\/p>\n

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Central to this bizarre world is quantum mechanics. These are the scientific tools that, although they seem to defy our intuition about how stuff ought to work, nonetheless offer an incredibly accurate picture of reality.<\/p>\n

Can You Understand Quantum Mechanics Intuitively?<\/h2>\n

Quantum mechanics (QM) is famously a subject that\u2019s been said to be impossible to grok. Even the famed physicist Richard Feynman casually remarked, \u201cI think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.\u201d<\/p>\n

This difficulty seems to be overstated. After all, thousands of physicists, engineers and chemists use QM brilliantly every day. Certainly that practical use doesn\u2019t happen without understanding.<\/p>\n

However, it does seem to be the case to me, as an outsider, that QM is very difficult to understand intuitively without knowing the math. Many of the key facts about QM seem unrelated in a casual explanation are simple logical consequences of the equations which govern QM.<\/p>\n

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Therefore, I feel like my earlier days of reading endless popular accounts of QM always lacked something important. Because there was no discussion of the math, or an attempt to wrap one\u2019s head around it, QM always seemed hopelessly confusing for me.<\/p>\n

Ultralearning Quantum Mechanics<\/h2>\n

Ultralearning is the practice of aggressively tackling a learning project of your own design and choosing. One of the more popular features of my blog has been my ultralearning projects<\/a> taking on classes, languages and other skills. <\/p>\n

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Since QM is such a tantalizing and challenging subject, I wanted to see if I could chew off a piece of it in a self-education project. Fortunately, a gap appeared in my schedule that made me think April might be a good time to squeeze one in, so I thought I\u2019d try to tackle my first attempts to get a good grounding in QM.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s Learn Quantum Mechanics<\/h2>\n

My strategy for this project is similar to the one I used in the MIT Challenge<\/a>. Take an open class from MIT\u2019s OpenCourseware<\/a>, try to learn as much as I can in a set period of time, and then take the final exam to see how well I learned the material.<\/p>\n

In this case, I\u2019m going to take MIT\u2019s first QM class, 8.04 – Quantum Physics I<\/a>. There are more classes after this one, so my month-long project isn\u2019t going to close the book on this topic, but I\u2019m hoping it will give me enough math so that my intuition about these things is on solid ground. In particular, understanding the basics of QM will also help me with understanding other subjects I\u2019ve had an interest in such as quantum computing, biology and cosmology.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s two main changes I\u2019m going to be making compared to my original approach I used during the MIT Challenge:<\/p>\n

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  1. I\u2019m going at a more leisurely pace.<\/strong> At the peak, my pace was one class per week. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s possible for me with this challenge, both because I won\u2019t be doing it full-time, and also because I expect the difficulty for this class to be higher than the MIT classes I did at that pace.<\/li>\n
  2. I\u2019m going to try to livestream the entire process<\/a><\/strong>. By doing the entire class live on camera, I\u2019m hoping I can share my thought process behind tackling an ambitious learning goal like this one. While I\u2019m sure most people aren\u2019t going to want to watch me studying the whole thing, I hope recording the whole process will make it easier to give a reference example for some of the learning strategies I discuss on the blog.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Why This Will Be a Hard Class (And Why That Matters)<\/h2>\n

    Quantum mechanics is difficult. However, in my case, that difficulty is doubly so for a few reasons:<\/p>\n