The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

Re:The building blocks of understanding are memorization and... by noobermin on Thursday September 15, 2016 @04:09PM (#12509413)

I remember first learning Quantum Field Theory. One week, my head would ache from what I was reading but by the next week, that bit would be incorporated into new parts, so the "confusing stuff" become foundation for the next week's confusing stuff. Eventually, it became intuitive.

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Re:The building blocks of understanding are memorization and... by sevenless on Thursday September 15, 2016 @04:12PM (#12509435)

How do you learn quantum field theory? I took a tiny amount of QM in school - basically, solving the Schrodinger equation for a few simple systems. What's the next step?

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Re:The building blocks of understanding are memorization and... by noobermin on Thursday September 15, 2016 @04:24PM (#12509519)

I read Shrednicki[0]'s book, a pre-print is freely available online (or was 4 or so years ago). A class in Grad school solidified it for me, specifically because they related it back to physics, like the standard model.

If you're going to start learning QFT, I suggest you try to understand time-dependent perturbation theory as much as possible. Also, be sure you have a handle on special relativity and scattering theory. QFT that most people use is really those things combined.

[0] http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/ms-qft-DRAFT.pdf

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Re:The building blocks of understanding are memorization and... by JadeNB on Friday September 16, 2016 @10:10AM (#12514098)

For what it's worth, that PDF says "Please DO NOT DISTRIBUTE this document. Instead, link to http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/∼mark/qft.html " (which has a link to the PDF).

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Re:The building blocks of understanding are memorization and... by noobermin on Friday September 16, 2016 @04:29PM (#12517103)

Fair enough. Unfortunately, I can't edit the comment now.

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Re:The building blocks of understanding are memorization and... by agumonkey on Friday September 16, 2016 @08:04AM (#12513405)

Anybody experienced the opposite ? first time I was exposed to combinatorics everything felt natural and intuitive. The following lesson everything had become a blur.

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Re:The building blocks of understanding are memorization and... by pbhjpbhj on Friday September 16, 2016 @05:39AM (#12512838)

QFT was my watershed the point where I really needed to learn, study, concentrate, apply, ... it wasn't at all intuitive to me.

Unfortunately I hadn't learnt to do any of those things; result was scraping a minimum pass.

To me it was like trying to picture n-dimensional hyper-cubes.

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Re:The building blocks of understanding are memorization and... by xenihn on Thursday September 15, 2016 @06:50PM (#12510523)

This was my exact experience learning how to program at 24.

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