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From: Jeff Layman <Jeff@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Quantum mystics
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2024 08:18:51 +0100
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On 10/06/2024 01:00, bitrex wrote:
> On 6/9/2024 5:07 PM, Martin Brown wrote:
> 
>>> That's hardly usual, or a reason to call him wrong. He won the Nobel
>>> Prize just to get free plane tickets.
>>
>> I'm not quite sure what he has said that annoyed JB - usually any
>> popular science programme for a general audience dumbs down quantum
>> mechanics to a point where it is completely unrecognisable to
>> professional physicists.
> 
> The general public tends to be exceptionally mathematics-averse. Even
> many people with advanced degrees in fields outside the hard sciences
> tend to be pretty math-averse.

Absolutely correct. I was ok with mathematics in school until we started 
on calculus. I could not, and still cannot, understand concepts such as 
"vanishingly small". I learnt to use the formulae for differentiation 
and integration and passed my exams, but my eyes clouded over then as 
far as abstract mathematical concepts are concerned, and they've never 
cleared! It's quite possible that I have to be able to imagine most 
things to understand them, and, to me, mathematics is just not within my 
imagination.

> There's a modest subset of the population that's math-averse but is not
> averse to trying to learn something qualitative about quantum physics or
> the Riemann Hypothesis or some other mathematical aspect of the hard
> sciences and enjoy the satisfaction of feeling like they know
> _something_ more than they went in, even if the details aren't within
> their grasp.

I'm interested in almost anything scientific, even if I can't understand 
it. Perhaps it's better that way - I don't have to see the wood for the 
trees!

> In contrast to the rather large subset of the population, even people
> with college degrees, who are OK with not knowing the first thing about
> such topics, and tend to prefer it that way.

-- 
Jeff