Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

The approach many courses take to physics, specially "modern Physics" is really bad, this is how it should be taught:

This is likely because at some point, experiments get more and more complicated, and so people are tempted to say "this is the truth" instead of "this is why we think this is the truth", which is much harder.

But we can't be lazy, there is no replacement to the why.

Related:

Condensed matter physics is one of the best examples of emergence. We start with a bunch of small elements which we understand fully at the required level (atoms, electrons, quantum mechanics) but then there are complex properties that show up when we put a bunch of them together.

Includes fun things like:

As of 2020, this is the other "fundamental branch of physics" besides to particle physics/nuclear physics.

Condensed matter is basically chemistry but without reactions: you study a fixed state of matter, not a reaction in which compositions change with time.

Just like in chemistry, you end up getting some very well defined substance properties due to the incredibly large number of atoms.

Just like chemistry, the ultimate goal is to do de-novo computational chemistry to predict those properties.

And just like chemistry, what we can actually is actually very limited in part due to the exponential nature of quantum mechanics.

Also since chemistry involves reactions, chemistry puts a huge focus on liquids and solutions, which is the simplest state of matter to do reactions in.

Condensed matter however can put a lot more emphasis on solids than chemistry, notably because solids are what we generally want in end products, no one likes stuff leaking right?

But it also studies liquids, e.g. notably superfluidity.

One thing condensed matter is particularly obsessed with is the fascinating phenomena of phase transition.

These are basically technically minded people that Ciro Santilli feels have similar interests/psychology to him, and who write too much for their own good:

Maybe one day these will also be legendary, who knows:

Another category Ciro admires are the "computational physics visualization" people, these people will go to Heaven:

Related:

Institution led:

Other mentions:

The markup language of OurBigBook.com.

Also used on Ciro Santilli's website as a static website via the OurBigBook CLI.

The one markup language to rule them all?

Documentation at: docs.ourbigbook.com.

Magic: The Gathering meta-based deck choice is a bimatrix game.

The best instrumental songs: Section "The best Chinese traditional instrumental music"

In the process of moving out of: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/music

Bibliography:

Can be calculated efficiently with the Extended Euclidean algorithm.

The beauty of this algorithm is that because exponentiation grows really fast, there is no hope that we can ever learn all the digits of an exponential, as there is simply not enough time or memory for that. Therefore, a natural sub-question is if we can know some part of that number, and knowing the smallest digits is the most natural version of that question.

One of its main applications is to determine the 3D structure of proteins.

Sometimes you are not able to crystallize the proteins however, and the method cannot be used.

Crystallizing is not simple because:

Cryogenic electron microscopy can sometimes determine the structures of proteins that failed crystallization.

"Dojo" is the japanese version of the word that unfortunately came to dominate in the West, the original is of course Chinese Dao4 chang3 (道場) which means:

Ciro Santilli would like to fully understand the statements and motivations of each the problems!

Easy to understand the motivation:

Hard to understand the motivation!