His father fought a lot with the stupid educational system to try and move his son to his full potential and move to more advanced subjects early.
A crime of society to try and prevent it. They actually moved the family from Singapore to Malaysia for a learning opportunity for the son. Amazing.
This is the perfect illustration of one of Ciro Santilli's most important complaints about the 2020 educational system:and why Ciro created OurBigBook.com to try and help fix the issue.
Possible social media
Bibliography:
The Most Talented Children And Adults On The Planet by Our Life (2008)
Source. Has some good mentions of Ainan and others.Ainan Cawley: Child prodigy (2013)
Source. - youtu.be/Ugi74cwPMSg?t=137 finding the right school
With major mathematicians holding ideas such as:it is not surprise that the state of STEM education is so shit as of 2020, especially at the the missing link between basic and advanced! This also implies that the number of people that can appreciate any advanced mathematics research is tiny, and consequently so is the funding.
Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. [...] It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done.
An Introduction To Quantum Field Theory by Peskin and Schroeder (1995) Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
This is very widely used in courses as of 2020, it became kind of the default book.
Unfortunately, this approach bores Ciro Santilli to death. Or perhaps is too just advanced for him to appreciate. Either of those.
800+ pages.
Maybe we need these people, maybe we do.
The problem as with many well known science communicators is that he falls too much on the basic side of the the missing link between basic and advanced.
Covers some specific hardcore subjects, notably quantum electrodynamics, in full mathematical detail, e.g.: "Quantum Field Theory Lecture Series" playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSpklniGdSfSsk7BSZjONcfhRGKNa2uou
As of 2020 Dietterich was a condensed matter PhD candidate or post-doc at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and he lives in Minnesota, sources:
Unfortunately the channel is too obsessed with mathematical detail (which it does amazingly), and does not give enough examples/application/intuition, which is what would be useful to most people, thus falling too much on the hardcore side of the missing link between basic and advanced.
This channel does have on merit however: compared to other university courses, it is much more direct, which might mean that you get to something interesting before you got bored to death, Section "You can learn more from older students than from faculty" comes to mind.
Videos generally involves short talks + a detailed read-through of a pre-prepared PDF. Dietterich has refused however giving the PDF or LaTeX source as of 2020 on comments unfortunately... what a wasted opportunity for society. TODO find the comment. Sam, if you ever Google yourself to this page, let's make a collab on OurBigBook.com and fucking change education forever man.
Full name as shown in channel content: Samuel Dietterich. Other accounts:
The Ultimate Goal Of My YouTube Channel by Dietterich Labs (2020)
Source. In this video Dietterich gives his ideal for the channel. Notably, he describes how the few experimental videos he has managed to make were done in a opportunistic way from experiments that were happening around him. This resonated with Ciro Santilli's ideas from videos of all key physics experiments.Sam Dietterich interview by Dietterich Labs (2022)
Source. TODO find patience to watch and summarize key points.The Sting Of Soft Corruption: My College Experience by Dietterich Labs
. Source. Academia is broken video.In this section we list charitable organizations that support education or research:
- elifesciences.org/labs by eLife
- www.digital-science.com/investment/catalyst-grant/ by Shuttleworth Foundation.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS
- www.chanzuckerberg.com/ Zuck has already invested in education previously:
- openuk.uk/
- Hmm, some/all of it is a copy of LibreTexts but with URLs shorter than a million characters, e.g.:
- Sir Peter Lampl, Education Endowment Foundation and Sutton Trust
- Jacobs Foundation, by German-Swiss coffee mogul Klaus Johann Jacobs
- joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/what-open-education_en
- www.non-trivial.org/ "Launch Your Own Impactful Project CHOOSE YOUR CAUSE. GET EXPERT GUIDANCE. FIND A SOLUTION AND MAKE IT HAPPEN."
- by United States Government:
- FY 2024 Education Innovation and Research:
- Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Notices Inviting Applications
- oese.ed.gov/offices/office-of-discretionary-grants-support-services/innovation-early-learning/education-innovation-and-research-eir/fy-2024-competition/
- www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/05/06/2024-09797/applications-for-new-awards-education-innovation-and-research-eir-program-early-phase-grants
- FY 2024 Education Innovation and Research:
Electroweak Theory and the Origin of the Fundamental Forces by PBS Space Time (2020)
Source. Unsatisfactory, as usual.Does deliver good concise ideas. Now we need something on the less concise side of it.
This term was invented by Ciro Santilli, and similar ideas certainly already exists with different names by other people. As the name suggests, it basically involves combining free education and gifted education, but with other more specific aspects crammed in that would make a precise name too long to read, as descried below.
Government must create selective, K-12 and university-level teaching institutions that are completely free.
As mentioned at pick few good bets and invest enough on thems, these do not need to be given to all students: what we have to do is to ensure that the top N-percent of the best students will get in, and that none of them will pay. Where N is as large as the budget society decides to put into this project, the larger the better. Therefore, perhaps "gifted education" is not the ideal name for this idea, as it generally implies very small N (1%?), while this project hopes for larger N, maybe 10%. But a minimal level of quality must be attained, it is pointless to dissolve the resources too much, if we only have enough for 1%, then so be it, start with 1%.
These institutions must start from the very first school year, and go all the way up through K-12 to the end of university. It is useless to start at university-level only otherwise only the rich students will have a chance of getting in, like Ciro Santilli saw in Brazil at the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo in the late 2000's: one day all students were gathered in the amphitheater, and they asked the students who had only gone through free government K-12 schools to raise their hands. Those were notably worse than the corresponding private schools, and the situation is inverted in university, where the best schools are the government ones. Out of about 500 people, at most 10 raised their hands!
These institutions should not have affirmative action entry quotas, including most importantly at the university level. Both rich and poor should be able to apply. Passing the selection criteria is all that matters. We just must ensure that the schools are widely advertised amongst disadvantaged communities, so that they will at least get their children to try to apply from an early age. This way, even if the rich always have an advantage due to better overall conditions, the poor are so much more numerous that the majority of students accepted will still be poor.
The school should follow the basic principles of how to teach, notably:
- students must have a flexible choice of what to learn. There will be no classes, all learning will happen either OurBigBook.com or on 1-to-1 meeting with tutors, or in discussions with fellow students.The term "gifted education" might suggest elitism, but Ciro Santilli strongly believes that different people have different skills, and that if everyone could focus on whatever it is that they want to do in life, be it engineering or the arts, rather than just pass a bunch of useless exam, then having the 10% "best" of each interest group would already cover a huge percentage of the population.
- Through it, students will be helped to directly achieve their greater life goals.There will be no teachers: each student will be assigned senior advisors, and together they will come with an individualized research proposal or business plan.There will be no useless mandatory institutional exams. Exams only need to be taken if a given advisor requires it to filter candidate students. But if you manage to impress them through other means, they can just accept you without the exam.A fundamental part of this is to fill the the missing link between basic and advanced. We want to help students to reach the state of the art of their field of interest as fast as possile.
- group students by interest, not by age
These schools must pay mentors as much as the average good non-free schools so you actually get comparably good teachers. Mentor selection would also be highly competitive, just as that of the students.
Once admitted, students will have guaranteed access to the school resources for a few years. This way, they won't need to worry about passing useless exams every three months.
All that matters is that they are progressing in their development plan. Rather than exams, students will do regular progress report sessions with their advisors, and will get periodic reviews from other advisors with similar interests.
Such projects could be funded by much needed wealth tax or other measures to tax the rich, which the people should claim through Referendum, that would be come more common with the adoption of electronic voting. Because the politicians are simply not being able to do it.
On a plate by Toby Morris (2015)
Source. 
On a plate by Toby Morris (2016) - 2
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On a plate by Toby Morris (2016) - 3
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On a plate by Toby Morris (2016) - 4
. People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.
Useful 99% of the time means you can make money with it.
Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.
Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.
This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.
And if you really can't make money from a subject, there is only one other thing people crave: beauty.
You have to give the beauty motivations upfront, before boring people to death with endless prerequisites, otherwise no one will ever want to learn it.
The exact same problem appears over and over, e.g.:
- transportaion: the last mile of the trip when everyone leaves the train and goes to their different respective offices is the most expensive
- telecommunications: the last mile of wire linking local hubs to actual homes is the most expensive
- electrical grid: same as telecommunications
Ciro Santilli also identified knowledge version of this problem: the missing link between basic and advanced.
In your normal 2020 broken educational system, it is the first time at which students get an official chance to learn something advanced, and possibly prepare to go venture into the PhD desert.
Falls a bit too much on the basic side of the the missing link between basic and advanced.
On one hand, yes, we need knowledge at all levels, and it is fine to start top-to-bottom with an overview.
The problem is, however, that there is a huge knowledge gap between the one liner "this is the truth" and the much more important "this is how we know it, these are the experiments" as mentioned at how to teach and learn physics.
Therefore, if you have that extremely rare knowledge, you should be writing that in addition to the dumbed down version with an open knowledge license. It takes time, but that's what really changes the world.
Ciro Santilli has always felt that there is a huge gap between "the very basic" and "the very advanced", as mentioned at: Section "The missing link between basic and advanced", which existing scientific vulgarization is not doing enough to address. In a sense, filling out this "middle path" is the main goal of OurBigBook.com.
Ciro really enjoyed the description of the "Arindam Kumar Chatterjee" youTube channel:
Theoretical/mathematical physics at the graduate level and above. This is NOT a popular science channel. Here you find real theoretical physicists doing real theoretical physics. We think it is important for people to get a taste of the real deal, and for aspiring theoretical physicists to see what they are working towards, i.e., to provide the public with something beyond the ubiquitous Michio Kaku and Brian Cox.
One thing must be said however: there seems to be an actual bias against researchers tho try to create vulgarization material: How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University by Sean Carroll (2011), and that is terrible.
There is often more value in a tutorial by a beginner who is trying to fully learn and explain a subject, than by an expert who is trying to "dumb it down" too much.
This is actually pretty good! Makes a small first step into The missing link between basic and advanced.
By the Simons Foundation.
Unfortunatly does not use a free license for content.
Theory that describes electrons and photons really well, and as Feynman puts it "accounts very precisely for all physical phenomena we have ever observed, except for gravity and nuclear physics" ("including the laughter of the crowd" ;-)).
Learning it is one of Ciro Santilli's main intellectual fetishes.
While Ciro acknowledges that QED is intrinsically challenging due to the wide range or requirements (quantum mechanics, special relativity and electromagnetism), Ciro feels that there is a glaring gap in this moneyless market for a learning material that follows the Middle Way as mentioned at: the missing link between basic and advanced. Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979) is one of the best attempts so far, but it falls a bit too close to the superficial side of things, if only Feynman hadn't assumed that the audience doesn't know any mathematics...
The funny thing is that when Ciro Santilli's mother retired, learning it (or as she put it: "how photons and electrons interact") was also one of her retirement plans. She is a pharmacist by training, and doesn't know much mathematics, and her English was somewhat limited. Oh, she also wanted to learn how photosynthesis works (possibly not fully understood by science as that time, 2020). Ambitious old lady!!!
Experiments: quantum electrodynamics experiments.
Combines special relativity with more classical quantum mechanics, but further generalizing the Dirac equation, which also does that: Dirac equation vs quantum electrodynamics. The name "relativistic" likely doesn't need to appear on the title of QED because Maxwell's equations require special relativity, so just having "electro-" in the title is enough.
Before QED, the most advanced theory was that of the Dirac equation, which was already relativistic but TODO what was missing there exactly?
As summarized at: youtube.com/watch?v=_AZdvtf6hPU?t=305 Quantum Field Theory lecture at the African Summer Theory Institute 1 of 4 by Anthony Zee (2004):
- classical mechanics describes large and slow objects
- special relativity describes large and fast objects (they are getting close to the speed of light, so we have to consider relativity)
- classical quantum mechanics describes small and slow objects.
- QED describes objects that are both small and fast
That video also mentions the interesting idea that:Therefore, for small timescales, energy can vary a lot. But mass is equivalent to energy. Therefore, for small time scale, particles can appear and disappear wildly.
- in special relativity, we have the mass-energy equivalence
- in quantum mechanics, thinking along the time-energy uncertainty principle,
QED is the first quantum field theory fully developed. That framework was later extended to also include the weak interaction and strong interaction. As a result, it is perhaps easier to just Google for "Quantum Field Theory" if you want to learn QED, since QFT is more general and has more resources available generally.
Like in more general quantum field theory, there is on field for each particle type. In quantum field theory, there are only two fields to worry about:
- photon field
- electromagnetism field
Lecture 01 | Overview of Quantum Field Theory by Markus Luty (2013)
Source. This takes quite a direct approach, one cool thing he says is how we have to be careful with adding special relativity to the Schrödinger equation to avoid faster-than-light information.Author: David Tong.
Number of pages circa 2021: 155.
It should also be noted that those notes are still being updated circa 2020 much after original publication. But without Git to track the LaTeX, it is hard to be sure how much. We'll get there one day, one day.
Some quotes self describing the work:
- Perhaps for this reason Ciro Santilli was not able to get as much as he'd out of those notes either. This is not to say that the notes are bad, just not what Ciro needed, much like P&S:This is a very clear and comprehensive book, covering everything in this course at the right level. To a large extent, our course will follow the first section of this book.
In this course we will not discuss path integral methods, and focus instead on canonical quantization.
A follow up course in the University of Cambridge seems to be the "Advanced QFT course" (AQFT, Quantum field theory II) by David Skinner: www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/dbs26/AQFT.html
Works at Caltech as of 2020.
Sean's series The Biggest Ideas in the Universe has some merit, but it's just to math-light falling a bit below the missing link between basic and advanced.
But as usual, it falls too close to popular science for Ciro's taste.