quantum field theory

[Daddy]

i am really perplexed why QFT and quantum mechanics are not covered in middle and high school.

There's a lot of incorrect notions about physics and chemistry that are much more clear when focusing on these fields

electron oribtals
electromagnetism

a ton of other shit.

american schools need better science

[Kalahari Inkantation]

Any decent introductory videos/channels?

[Daddy]

Any decent introductory videos/channels?

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g PBS Spacetime has a lot of great stuff. Chris (the guy with the beard) has most of the content relating to quantum stuff


https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH4BNI0-FOK2dMXoFtViWHw This guy also has a some stuff but it's more varied

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheScienceAsylum he also covers a lot of this but explanations are a lot more simplified and his behavior makes me think it's geared towards a younger audience

[silvertone]

i seek to ban quantum field theory ASAP

[The artist formally known]

i am really perplexed why QFT and quantum mechanics are not covered in middle and high school.

I didn't have physics even covered at my high school, let alone modern physics. I cannot agree more though, the concepts might not sink in the first time but at least exposing kids to these ideas VERY early would be a godsend for those who desire to learn physics.

american schools need better science

Honestly if they could just cover classical physics and maybe even electromagnetism in high school that would be amazing as it currently stands.

I didn't get any real physics education until community college when I took my first physics class which was incredibly more challenging than previous science classes... and I loved that. (It was a calculus based physics class.)

However just the basics of physics should be taught in high school at the very least. I'm not even sure that it would require a lot of math (and obviously no calculus unless of course it is some AP type class). I'd just like to see basic concepts being taught, no need for complex messy math, at least not the first time around.

[Mando Pandango]

My high school chemistry class covered electron orbitals

[Kalahari Inkantation]

My high school chemistry class covered electron orbitals

mine did too but i guess we would have had the same curriculum lol

my hs physics class also covered 'modern' physics in addition to classical physics, up to and including the sub-subatomic particles like quarks and gluons

i can't claim to remember all of it but i'd say it was a pretty comprehensive course, especially at the hs level

[Mando Pandango]

My high school chemistry class covered electron orbitals

mine did too but i guess we would have had the same curriculum lol

my hs physics class also covered 'modern' physics in addition to classical physics, up to and including the sub-subatomic particles like quarks and gluons

i can't claim to remember all of it but i'd say it was a pretty comprehensive course, especially at the hs level

I remember touching on that, only in the sense that we learned what the particles in the current model are, but nothing beyond the names.

[Daddy]

My high school chemistry class covered electron orbitals

they cover it in a way that made it seem like electrons were in a neat orbit around the nucleus (like planets around a star) or did they make it clear it was more of a "cloud" where each orbital was more of a probability of an electron being in that position?

There's a ton of concepts in physics that get touched on in high school level physics that make incredibly more sense once the quantum phenomena behind them is explained.

[Kalahari Inkantation]

my hs physics class also covered 'modern' physics in addition to classical physics, up to and including the sub-subatomic particles like quarks and gluons

i can't claim to remember all of it but i'd say it was a pretty comprehensive course, especially at the hs level

I remember touching on that, only in the sense that we learned what the particles in the current model are, but nothing beyond the names.

mine barely went any further than that, but we did for example have to learn their charges and the quark-gluon compositions of protons and neutrons (not that memorizing smth like 'a neutron contains 2 down quarks and 1 up quark' is especially demanding)

Did they cover it in a way that made it seem like electrons were in a neat orbit around the nucleus (like planets around a star) or did they make it clear it was more of a "cloud" where each orbital was more of a probability of an electron being in that position?

my hs chemics courses did make it clear that while the bohr model isn't really an accurate representation of the nebulous reality of atomic structure, the orbital interpretation is still useful enough for making highly accurate predictions until you get to the quantum level, and it's enough to provide a basic fundamental understanding of chemics and answer hs chemistry questions lol

so we were aware of the uncertainty principle even if we weren't taught exactly in accordance with it

There's a ton of concepts in physics that get touched on in high school level physics that make incredibly more sense once the quantum phenomena behind them is explained.

and while this is true, a high school course can't realistically cover all of physics in depth from newton to heisenberg in 9 months lol, naturally some shortcuts have to be taken

i can only speak for my district but i do think its hs physics course does an adequate job at instilling a fundamental understanding of classical physics, which in any case is the only physics that the average person is likely to deal with regularly

but it also made an earnest attempt to familiarize us with modern physics even if only on a basic level, so that, at the very least, college-bound students wouldn't be completely blindsided the whole new world of physics that is quantum mechanix

its hs chemics courses were similarly comprehensive

[Mando Pandango]

Yeah what tec said goes for me too. My physics class the next year went into uncertainty.

[Daddy]

Did they go into in terms of explaining electron clouds or just bring up the basics of Heisenburg's uncertainty principle and Schrodinger's cat?

Because, unless schools stepped their game up after I finished in 2007, "covered" (if you call it that) the terms used in the basics with explanations that aren't even that correct.

For example, the whole point of schrodinger's cat was to mock the uncertainty principle and is often taught in a way that ignores the fact that "observation" collapsing the wave function is literally any interaction with other particles or fields and isn't a literal scientist making observations

[Mando Pandango]

Schrodinger didn't even come up. We learned about the double slit experiment and touched on electron clouds/orbital shapes, and the basic way they worked according to the Bohr model. But we knew it wasn't just concentric spheres.

Nothing beyond that.

[silvertone]

i seek to ban quantum field theory ASAP

i changed my mind.

[strongbad]

i dont buy this bs