Incoming links: John Bardeen
The Story of John Bardeen at the University of Illinois (2010)
Source. - youtu.be/OyV8qSwGUHU?t=976 of when Bardeen demoed the transistor in class is particularly memorable
- youtu.be/OyV8qSwGUHU?t=1105 some of his golf colleagues didn't know he had won a Nobel Prize!
- youtu.be/OyV8qSwGUHU?t=1260 good jokes about receiving the second Nobel Prize
Congratulations on the second prize. With the third you get to keep the king!
The king asked my mother [Bardeen's son speaking]: "Where's he family"? The mother answered: "Well, they're at home or school". And the kind replied: "Well, next time, bring them!"
People had already patented a lot of stuff before without being able to make them work. Nonsense.
As the name suggests, this is not very sturdy, and was quickly replaced by bipolar junction transistor.
Students must be allowed to progress as fast as they want Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
One of the main reasons for Section "Students must have a flexible choice of what to learn".
We've created a system where people just wait, and wait, and wait, never really doing what they really want.
They wait through school to get into university.
They wait through university to get to masters.
They wait through masters to get to PhD.
They wait through PhD to become a PI.
And for the minuscule fraction of those that make it, they become fund proposal writers.
And if you make any wrong choice along the, it's all over, you can't continue anymore, the cost would be too great.
So you just become software engineer or a consultant until you die.
Is this the society that we really want?
From True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen Chapter 2 "Roots":
John ([Bardeen].) and Bill ([his brother]) entered the combined seventh-eighth grade at "Uni High," Wisconsin's University High School, in the same year-John from third grade and William from fifth.Established in September 1911, the school had been conceived as a laboratory for training high school instructors and for testing progressive ideas in education. In its philosophy and organization, Uni resembled the Dewey School. The students were accelerated as much as possible to keep lessons challenging. One goal was to "introduce pupils to high school methods and subjects before they reached the 9th grade." The fourth quarter, offered during the summer, allowed students who had missed work or had fallen behind to catch up. It also enabled the brightest students to complete senior high school in only three years...Even with the disruption of Althea’s death, John completed all his Uni High course work by age thirteen. But as he was "a little leery about graduating so young," he and Bill decided to attend Madison Central High School for two years, taking additional mathematics, science, and literature courses not offered at Uni. By the time John had turned fifteen and Bill seventeen, the two had completed every course of interest at Madison Central. There was no longer any reason to postpone entering college. In the fall of 1923 they both entered the freshman class at the University of Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, at the University of Oxford www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/aug/21/highereducation.accesstouniversity Oxford to turn away child prodigiesFUUUUUUUCK. And so, in protecting children, we also rob them of their own future. But the official policy as of 2023 is unchanged at least in theory: uni-of-oxford.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/557/~/do-oxford-undergraduate-courses-have-a-minimum-age-requirement%3F Article also mentions Yinan Wang. Can't find his profiles now.
We have been pushed to consider it, not because of concerns about whether it is psychologically healthy for children to study here, but because of child protection laws which have come into play this year for the first time.
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