Strangely enough, QM's formalism is not any more difficult than other areas of physics. The mathematics of the "standard" QM is not any worse than, let's say, electromagnetism. Yet, to many people, especially non-physicists, QM presents a very daunting effort to understand.
I strongly believe that it all comes down to how we understand things and how we expand our knowledge. Tyically, when we teach students new things, what we do is build upon their existing understanding. We hope that a student already has a foundation of knowledge In certain areas, such as basic mathematics, etc.., So that we can use that to teach them about forces, motion, energy, and other fun stuff in intro physics. Then, after they understand the basic ideas, we show them the same thing, but with more complications added to it.
The same thing occurs when we try to help a student doing a homework problem. We always try to ask what the student know already, such as the basic principle being tested in that question. Does the student know where to start? What about the most general form of the equation that is relevant to the problem? Once we know a starting point, we then build on that to tackle that problem.
0 comments:
Post a Comment