Physics education needs more focus on understanding experiments and their history by
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is the only way to truly understand and appreciate the subject.
Understanding the experiments gets intimately entangled with basically learning the history of physics, which is extremely beneficial as also highlighted by Ron Maimon, related: there is value in tutorials written by early pioneers of the field.
In the Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez! Richard Feynman describes his experience teaching in Brazil in the early 1950s, and how everything was memorized, without any explanation of the experiments or that the theory has some relationship to the real world!
Although things have improved considerably since in Brazil, Ciro still feels that some areas of physics are still taught without enough experiments described upfront. Notably, ironically, quantum field theory, which is where Feynman himself worked.
Feynman gave huge importance to understanding and explaining experiments, as can also be seen on Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979).
'Making' - the best way of learning science and technology by Manish Jain (2018)
Source. Videos should be found/made for all of those: videos of all key physics experiments
- speed of light experiment
- basically all experiments listed under Section "Quantum mechanics experiment" such as:
- Davisson-Germer experiment
The key thing in a good system of units is to define units in a way that depends only on physical properties of nature.
Ideally (or basically necessarily?) the starting point generally has to be discrete phenomena, e.g.
- number of times some light oscillates per second
- number of steps in a quantum Hall effect or Josephson junction
What we don't want is to have macroscopic measurement artifacts, (or even worse, the size of body parts! Inset dick joke) as you can always make a bar slightly more or less wide. And even metals evaporate over time! Though the mad people of the Avogadro project still attempted otherwise well into the 2010s!
There is only space for two languages at most in the world: the compiled one, and the interpreted one.
Those two are languages not by any means perfect from a language design point of view, and there are likely already better alternatives, they are only chosen due to a pragmatic tradeoff between ecosystem and familiarity.
Ciro predicts that Python will become like Fortran in the future: a legacy hated by most who have moved to JavaScript long ago (which is slightly inferior, but too similar, and with too much web dominance to be replaced), but with too much dominance in certain applications like machine learning to be worth replacing, like Fortran dominates certain HPC applications. We'll see. Maybe non performance critical scripting languages are easier to replace.
C++ however is decent, and is evolving in very good directions in the 2010's, and will remain relevant in the foreseeable future.
Bash can also be used when you're lazy. But if the project goes on, you will sooner or later regret that choice.
The language syntax in itself does not matter. All that matters is how many useful libraries and tooling it has.
This is how other languages compare:
- C: but cannot make a large codebase DRY without insanity
- Ruby: the exact same as Python, and only strong in one domain: web development, while Python rules everything else, and is not bad on web either. So just kill Ruby, please.
- JavaScript: it is totally fine if Node.js destroys Python and becomes the ONE scripting language to rule them all since Python and JavaScript are almost equally crappy (although JavaScript is a bit more of course).One thing must be said tough:
someobject.not_defined_propertysilently returningundefinedrather than blowing up is bullshit. - Go: likely a good replacement for Python. If the ecosystem gets there, will gladly use it more.
- Java: good language, but has an ugly enterprisey ecosystem, Oracle has made/kept the development process too closed, and API patenting madness on Android just kills if off completely
- Haskell: many have tried to learn some functional stuff, but too hard. Sounds really cool though.
- Rust: sounds cool, you will gladly replace C and C++ with it if the ecosystem ramps up.
- C: Microsoft is evil
- Tcl, Perl: Python killed them way back and is less insane
- R, GNU Octave and any other "numerical computing language": all of this is a waste of society's time as explained at: Section "Numerical computing language"
- Swift: Ciro would rather stay away from Apple dominated projects if possible since they sell a closed source operating system
Great overview of the earlier history of unit standardization.
Gives particular emphasis to the invention of gauge blocks.
Even if we cannot do everything in functional, we should at least strive to clearly extract functional substes in what we do.
Uses the frequency of the hyperfine structure of caesium-133 ground state, i.e spin up vs spin down of its valence electron , to define the second.
International System of Units definition of the second since 1967, because this is what atomic clocks use.
TODO why does this have more energy than the hyperfine split of the hydrogen line given that it is further from the nucleus?
E.g., as of 2020, their help login help.openstreetmap.org/ shows MyOpenID as an option, which was discontinued in 2014, and not Google OAuth.
They do still seem to have a bit more activity than gis.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/openstreetmap on Stack Exchange.
Complaints:
- Transliteration is off by default!...... wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Translation You just have to learn all scripts ever. Good luck with the Chinese characters. Genius.
- In order to see information about places, you have to click "Query features" on the toolbar first. Who made such a terrible UI? Direct click is a much, and so easy to implement?
- It is impossible to discern different types of paths and other walking path symbols, the symbols are too small, and just scale down to a line no matter how much you zoom in.
- Power lines are way too visible. While that is kind of cool, it is useless and distracting to most people most of the time.
- No street-level imagery...: help.openstreetmap.org/questions/1178/adding-photos
- No aerial imagery: help.openstreetmap.org/questions/6849/how-can-i-see-the-aerial-imagery-without-editing-the-map But that is kind of understandable, as that one might not be free.
- No restaurant ratings: help.openstreetmap.org/questions/64852/ratings-for-pois because it is "Subjective". OMG those people, such a huge value powerhouse wasted.
Interestingly, the very first programming language with an actual implementation was interpreted: Short Code in 1950.
And just like modern scripting languages, it reduced execution speed by about 50x.
A series of systems usually derived from the International System of Units that are more convenient for certain applications.
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