10You literally have written a book.
7 - 9Expert, go-to person on this technology.
5 - 6Solid daily working knowledge. Highly proficient.
3 - 4Comfortable working with this, have to check manual on some things.
1 - 2Have worked with it previously but either not much, or rusty.
I copied this grading scale mechanism from a failed Google interview ;-)
One problem with it is that I am always very hesitant to put a 5 on anything, who can not look at the documentation?
It is also hard to scope things right. Who can claim to be a C++ or Linux kernel expert, even if you wrote a book about it, since those are such humongous topics?
As a result, I haven't updated this in a while, and things may be out of date.
If your project does something that interests me, I can what it takes to contribute. Tell me what I must know, how long I have to learn it, and I'll call you back when I've mastered it.
This experiment seems to be really hard to do, and so there aren't many super clear demonstration videos with full experimental setup description out there unfortunately.
For single-photon non-double-slit experiments see: single photon production and detection experiments. Those are basically a pre-requisite to this.
photon experiments:
Non-elementary particle:
Video 1.
Single Photon Interference by Veritasium (2013)
Source. Claims to do exactly what we want, but does not describe the setup precisely well enough. Notably, does not justify how he knows that single photons are being produced.
Semiconductor equipment maker Updated 2025-07-16
As mentioned at youtu.be/16BzIG0lrEs?t=397 from Video "Applied Materials by Asianometry (2021)", originally the companies fabs would make their own equipment. But eventually things got so complicated that it became worth it for separate companies to focus on equipment, which then then sell to the fabs.
Semiconductor device fabrication Updated 2025-07-16
This is the lowest level of abstraction computer, at which the basic gates and power are described.
At this level, you are basically thinking about the 3D layered structure of a chip, and how to make machines that will allow you to create better, usually smaller, gates.
Sci-Inspi (YouTube channel) Updated 2025-07-16
The channel is also notable for the fact that the author makes his own music.
Video 1.
Behind the Scenes by Sci-Inspi (2020)
Source. His name is Manuael, aka Manu, and he is the chemistry lab technician at a community college.
From Scientific Autobiography by Max Planck translated by Frank Gaynor (1949):
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Figure 1.
How Math works by SMBC Comics
. Source. An amazing representation of Science makes progress funeral by funeral. Steps:
  • Step 1: Insight
  • Step 2: Resistance
  • Step 3: Debate
  • Step 4: Additional decades of debate
  • Step 5: Changing of the guard
  • Step 6: Transmission to students
Ciro Santilli had once assigned this as one of Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts, but he later found that Wikipedia actually says exactly that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering ("similar to scientific research, the only difference being that scientific research is about a natural phenomenon") so maybe that is where Ciro picked it up unconsciously in the first place.
Then, for each energy , from the discussion at Section "Solving the Schrodinger equation with the time-independent Schrödinger equation", the solution is:
Therefore, we see that the solution is made up of infinitely many plane wave functions.
Saylor Academy Updated 2025-07-16
This is an interesting initiative which has some similarities to Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook project.
The fatal flaw of the initiative in Ciro Santilli's opinion is the lack of user-generated content. We will never get there without UGC and algorithms, never.
Also as of 2021, it mostly useless business courses: learn.saylor.org unfortunately.
But it has several redeeming factors which Ciro Santilli aproves of:
The founder Michael J. Saylor looks a bit crooked, Rich people who create charitable prizes are often crooked comes to mind. But maybe he's just weird.
Video 1.
Michael Saylor interview by Lex Fridman (2022)
Source.
At the timestamp:
When I go, all my assets will flow into a foundation, and the foundation's mission is to make education free for everybody forever.
What statement... maybe he's actually not crooked, maybe it was just an accounting mistake... God, why.
If only Ciro Santilli knew how to contact him and convince him that his current approach is innefective and that Ciro has something better! Michael, please Google into this page some day, Ciro Santilli needs funding for OurBigBook.com. A hopeless Tweet at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1548350114623660035. Also tried to hit his saylor@strategy.com.
Riemann hypothesis Updated 2025-07-16
visualizing the Riemann hypothesis and analytic continuation by 3Blue1Brown (2016) is a good quick visual non-mathematical introduction is to it.
Video 1.
What is the Riemann hypothesis REALLY about? by HexagonVideos (2022)
Source.
Richard Feynman's drug use Updated 2025-07-16
From Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez!:
The people from the airlines were somewhat bored with their lives, strangely enough, and at night they would often go to bars to drink. I liked them all, and in order to be sociable, I would go with them to the bar to have a few drinks, several nights a week.
One day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along the sidewalk opposite the beach at Copacabana past a bar. I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: "That's just what I want; that'll fit just right. I'd just love to have a drink right now!"
I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, "Wait a minute! It's the middle of the afternoon. There's nobody here, There's no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?" - and I got scared.
I never drank ever again, since then. I suppose I really wasn't in any danger, because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I didn't understand frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don't want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick. It's the same reason that, later on, I was reluctant to try experiments with LSD in spite of my curiosity about hallucinations.
One notable drug early teens Ciro consumed was Magic: The Gathering, see also: Section "Magic: The Gathering is addictive".
Resonance Updated 2025-07-16
Resonance is a really cool thing.
Examples:
Perhaps a key insight of resonance is that the reonant any lossy system tends to look like the resonance frequency quite quickly even if the initial condition is not the resonant condition itself, because everything that is not the resonant frequency interferes destructively and becomes noise. Some examples of that:
  • striking a bell or drum can be modelled by applying an impuse to the system
  • playing a pipe instrument comes down to blowing a piece that vibrates randomly, and then leads the pipe to vibrate mostly in the resonant frequency. Likely the same applies to bowed string instruments, the bow must be creating a random vibration.
  • playing a plucked string instrument comes down to initializing the system to an triangular wave form and then letting it evolve. TODO find a simulation of that!
Another cool aspect of resonance is that it was kind of the motivation for de Broglie hypothesis, as de Broglie was kind of thinking that electroncs might show discrete jumps on atomic spectra because of constructive interference.
Representation theory Updated 2025-07-16
Basically, a "representation" means associating each group element as an invertible matrices, i.e. a matrix in (possibly some subset of) , that has the same properties as the group.
Or in other words, associating to the more abstract notion of a group more concrete objects with which we are familiar (e.g. a matrix).
Each such matrix then represents one specific element of the group.
This is basically what everyone does (or should do!) when starting to study Lie groups: we start looking at matrix Lie groups, which are very concrete.
Or more precisely, mapping each group element to a linear map over some vector field (which can be represented by a matrix infinite dimension), in a way that respects the group operations:
As shown at Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2015)
Bibliography:

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