Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

Most commonly known as a byproduct radioactive decay.

Their energy is very high compared example to more common radiation such as visible spectrum, and there is a neat reason for that: it's because the strong force that binds nuclei is strong so transitions lead to large energy changes.

A decay scheme such as Figure "caesium-137 decay scheme" illustrates well how gamma radiation happens as a byproduct of radioactive decay due to the existence of nuclear isomer.

Gamma rays are pretty cool as they give us insight into the energy levels/different configurations of the nucleus.

They have also been used as early sources of high energy particles for particle physics experiments before the development of particle accelerators, serving a similar purpose to cosmic rays in those early days.

But gamma rays they were more convenient in some cases because you could more easily manage them inside a laboratory rather than have to go climb some bloody mountain or a balloon.

The positron for example was first observed on cosmic rays, but better confirmed in gamma ray experiments by Carl David Anderson.

More precisely, for students whose parents don't live near the school. Or alternatively, online-only courses that offer the same diploma as the presencial version. Or a compromise where the best N% students get accommodation, where N is a parameter of how decent your society is overall.

Since all the learning resources will be available online on OurBigBook.com, or through online 1-to-1 chats with mentors, it might be cheaper for students to work either from their parent's homes if their home has reasonable work conditions: a silent room with reasonable Internet access and no drug addicts in the house.

Alternatively, a public local library with free WiFi would do as well. But there would need to be a strict silence policy enforced, unlike most public libraries we see today. Ciro once saw a bird shaped noise detector that would sing if the noise went above a certain threshold, that was a good idea. Just like linting, it is easier to let machines decide deterministically on subjective questions to reduce useless arguments over who is right. Ciro has even seen libraries where the local council uses the same library open space as a citizen counsel area. What's the fucking point... these people have never done any deep work in their lives.

Then the state only needs to pay transportation and temporary accommodation to attend concentrated month-long laboratory workshop courses and week-long conferences, since the only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories. In cases where the home conditions are not good enough, the state can either pay for on-demand WeWork-like offices near the student's home, of for a full on-campus accommodation as in a boarding school. What is indispensable is that all students who pass the entry criteria must have such working conditions. Students who stay home can also earn a scholarship to help pay for their rent, food and Internet access.

Anything else is just incredibly unfair to the poor. Ciro Santilli has already witnessed two cases, in developed, and under-developed countries, where very high potential poorer students were forced to work to support themselves in parallel to a demanding degree because their parents couldn't pay their rent on a different city, and the students mental health issues due to this. In one of those cases the student had to abandon the course altogether.

It doesn't help that school has become a pure student-evaluation system, which basically implies putting studets through a lot of useless pressure.

One of the stories that Ciro Santilli's father tells is about how when they were dating, one of Ciro Santilli's mother's greatest wish for her hypotetical child would be that "they should not need to work during their studies as she had". As destiny would have it, Ciro Santilli's family had good conditions and Ciro never thought even once about money. And even then, school still sucked. Imagine without that basic, mandatory, stability!

This is a version of free gifted education but more focused on university.

This is Ciro Santilli's ideal university system. It is a system that actually lives up to the name "Open University":

Related:

So far as of the early 2020's, the university that comes closest to some but not all of these principles is the University of the People. It's sad that it's such a crappy unknown thing, but it is what it is.

Besides of course sexual selection, considering in this section only "formal learning" activities.

Consider e.g. the 2020 University of Oxford, where many many people are taking courses without any laboratory work (and also without much use at all) like literature and history, and they are paying about 9k pounds/year for it: how much it costs to study at the University of Oxford?.

Basically all of this could be done online from books.

Laboratories are impossible however, because expendables of every experiment you do cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars, not to mention crazy upfront equipment costs.

For this reason, the brick and mortar aspect universities should focus exclusively on laboratories, and ensuring that the students with the most relevant knowledge (which can be readily obtained online) get access to those laboratories. Students should of course fully master every aspect of theory pertinent to their experiments. principal investigators should hand pick whichever criteria they want to select their students, possibly based partly on exam as a service if they find it a useful metric.

Furthermore, the use of laboratories should put great focus on novel research. A lot of laboratory instruction could be done from video of an experiments. As much as possible, we should use laboratories for novel research. Related: Section "Videos of all key physics experiments".