As a person who was taught the “traditional” way, I feel that Aaronson’s disparagement of it misses—and the title tellingly omits—an important reason for it: that it tries to explain why quantum mechanics is mechanics. For that, you actually do need to know Hamilton–Jacobi, and ideally also know how to get the eikonal equation from electrodynamics, perhaps even understand high-frequency (Liouville–Green or, with a bit of abuse of language popular among physicists, JWKB) approximations in general. Same applies somewhat less poignantly if you’re not looking for motivation but are still planning to do QM to things in, y’know, continuous physical space.
The realization, apparently due to quantum computing people, that you can get away with not doing QM to things in continous physical space and still understand quite a lot of fun and useful QM stuff is very much valuable; you absolutely can build good courses that way. It’s just that I think that the pedagogical problem of laying out this general “quantum dynamical systems” approach in a compatible and not terribly redundant way to include the things learned a “quantum mechanics in space” course—which is absolutely required if e.g. you want to move on to QFT in solid-state or high-energy physics—is unsolved and to a large extent even untried. (Susskind’s semi-popular book is a notable exception, but I don’t feel he managed to pull it off.)
And, as usual, calling the traditional approach “historical” is a huge stretch. The standard QM course doesn’t talk about the founders’ (valid but extremely clumsy) approaches to relativistic corrections to the hydrogen spectrum any more than the standard calculus course talks about Newton’s early forays into algebraic and (what would come to be called) tropical geometry. (Or the standard programming course talks about native–bytecode interworking in the AGC, but even the most academic of programming courses are rarely branded as historical.)
> tries to explain why quantum mechanics is mechanics
Curiously though, since the 1800s analytical mechanics, too, began to be seen as a branch of mathematics. But I think that in this case, just as in the case of quantum mechanics, it is still extremely important to see the physical content, and the physical principles, that allow us to apply this or that mathematical framework. The fact that physics is a heavy user of mathematical methods (probably the heaviest of all sciences) does not mean that it reduces to mathematics. Don't lose the forest for the trees.
As someone who was a math and physics major at one point, that's what I consider the biggest missed opportunity in physics education. I was always taught physics as a set of theorems that you apply to some set of random problems. Zero effort given to the context, actual applications, and physical insight.
That kind of put me off physics, and I've been longing ever since for someone to build a course that essentially covers physics historically, starting from the problems physics helped us solve, and that puts modelling and experiment at the center, instead of just teaching recipes.
I feel the like incredibly common idea that all applications derive from theory might be one of the must harmful misconception in education.
I believe every person who is allowed to work in a quantum field (heh) should have been able to run at least a trivial quantum experiment.
That is, Scott Aaronson should go sit in some collaborator's lab and set up all the apparatus and analyze all the data, before he gets to spew about "quantum" to the general public. This should also apply to any theoretical physicist- I would love to see String Theorists in a lab setting up a michaelson morley experiment.
I guess this comes down to the distinction between quantum mechanics and quantum information. Just as classical probability and information theory can be explored independently of classical mechanics, quantum probability and information theory make sense to study independently of quantum mechanics. (I think the article serves as a great intro to quantum information, but a rather lacking intro to quantum mechanics.)
The realization, apparently due to quantum computing people, that you can get away with not doing QM to things in continous physical space and still understand quite a lot of fun and useful QM stuff is very much valuable; you absolutely can build good courses that way. It’s just that I think that the pedagogical problem of laying out this general “quantum dynamical systems” approach in a compatible and not terribly redundant way to include the things learned a “quantum mechanics in space” course—which is absolutely required if e.g. you want to move on to QFT in solid-state or high-energy physics—is unsolved and to a large extent even untried. (Susskind’s semi-popular book is a notable exception, but I don’t feel he managed to pull it off.)
And, as usual, calling the traditional approach “historical” is a huge stretch. The standard QM course doesn’t talk about the founders’ (valid but extremely clumsy) approaches to relativistic corrections to the hydrogen spectrum any more than the standard calculus course talks about Newton’s early forays into algebraic and (what would come to be called) tropical geometry. (Or the standard programming course talks about native–bytecode interworking in the AGC, but even the most academic of programming courses are rarely branded as historical.)