I Have Pet Peeves

I think one of my biggest is when people conflate being educated and being intelligent. Or more commonly being ignorant and being stupid. It obviously happens pretty much exclusively online.

But when I say "[i]This[/i] is why you use a Hamiltonian operator for the Schrodinger Equation and as a result..." and your response is "Nope. You're wrong. Look at this youtube video on quantum mechanics that PBS made! It's proof you're wrong!" you're only embarrassing yourself.

I'm not saying I'm smarter than you are. You're not wrong because you're stupid. You're wrong because you're ignorant. You can't fix stupid. But you [i]can[/i] fix ignorance. Read a damn book, son.

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SomeMichGuy · M

Here, here!

Many people confuse their ignorance (or others') with stupidity. I have told many people that the ideas of even, say, Einstein, are accessible to ANYone with an average IQ. It might take time, yes, but we have 116 yrs of understanding Special Relativity, and over 100 of understanding General Relativity...including how to explain/teach it. So people of today actually have a big advantage over Einstein!

And the Lagrangian & Hamiltonian reformulations of Newtonian mechanics are amazing, aren't they?

Then add the commutation relations to the Hamiltonian &

[i]H ->[/i]\hat{[i]H[/i]}

and you're in business.

Pretty sublime that undergrads get to the spherical harmonics, etc., and the [i]n, l, m_l[/i] quantum numbers, and can figure out the number of allowable states in Hydrogenic atoms, then account for the Pauli exclusion principle, and you understand the structure of the periodic table...the building blocks of chemistry laid bare!

SW-User

Lol, guess you told him.
What grinds my gears, is people who idolize some long dead celebrity and pretend they know them so well

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