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From: Jeroen Belleman <jeroen@nospam.please>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Quantum mystics
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2024 17:10:29 +0200
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On 6/10/24 02:00, 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.

I'm not all that math-averse, but a formula is a shorthand notation
of some relation, and often it will take some time to parse. If it
contains unfamiliar symbols, there is little hope of making sense
of it. If someone throws a formula at me that is more than a little
involved, I tend to skip over it in the hope that the accompanying
text will give me enough context.

Formulas are often enlightening. For a long time, I was puzzled
by "forces that drop off faster than 1/r^2". How could that be?
It turns out the reason is that whatever transmits the influence
*decays*. The formula had an extra factor exp(-t/tau) in it. I'd
never heard anyone explain it that way. Only the formula made it
clear. You'd get the same kind of expression to describe the number
of soap bubbles hitting a remote target. If done right, it would
even be quantized. But that's not how it's explained. You always
hear this mystic "drop off faster than..." phrase.

[...]
Jeroen Belleman