Perusing online resources for Differential Equations shows that there doesn't seem to be much agreement on how to define the core subject, and there is no grounding on 'how we got here' to provide a path forward to people just starting out. My experience so far, at least.

When the entire video is generated by an AI, that dynamic changes. It's no issue to improve "the script", and have it seamlessly regenerated. We can't be that far away from this capability, and it could have a profound impact on available learning resources.

Can imagine a world where it doesn't matter where or how you get your education, all that matters is that you can have your knowledge verified by an accredited _testing_ institution. This would open education up to a world of creative competition for students, and allow individuals to find a learning paradigm that best works for themselves.

Some people are there for "the experience", no matter how much it costs, nor how little benefit it results in. They will still be paying $80k for an experience that qualifies them for nothing, even though they had that qualification already before they started.

Some other people are there for the network, and/or will learn leadership skills in that environment. They can't build/learn those things in an online environment.

How are you ever going to learn anything truly novel in the world if you always delegate teaching to a teacher?

they are there to give you a chance

maybe it is impossible for you to do this, but it’s clearly not impossible for others

that challenge is valuable information

maybe a different area is a better pursuit for you

or maybe a better way to view learning

good luck

Taking a longer time than normal to learn a topic and prepare university exams might be a good alternative to burnout; or maybe your lifestyle and/or intellect are incompatible with studying.

Why such a desire to be spoonfed, whining about having to put in the work?

Almost none of the work is 'rewriting the book.'

The mid-game is personalised, conversational, interactive tutoring.

The end-game will be deciding how much humans need to know about any of this, because AI will be far better at 99% of it.

If this seems unlikely, consider that Cauchy, Gauss, Laplace, and so on were all super-elite 0.001%-ers in terms of ability.

No one knows whether AI will eventually have the creative ability to work at their level of insight.

Personalised training could select for prodigies, and - whatever we decide to do with them - we'd have more super-talents than we do now.

Currently a lot of talent is wasted because of political and economic inefficiencies.

There will likely be video. Visual presentations can be an important part of learning. Perhaps it will be generated JIT, but likely AOT compilation of video will represent a useful savings in processing power. Students can always "put their hand up" to interrupt a presentation for a little one-on-one time with professor AI.

The book was probably okay-ish, the point is that surely someone could have made some improvements in the past few decades

So true, in many areas. I know a couple of young people that got destroyed by this kind of meat grinding machinery. Typically applies to every medical studies in France, where many kids (with parents that have the money to pay) are going to Spain, Romania or Belgium to study in a less oppressing environment and better teaching methods.

Honestly your problem was that you didn't know any Classical Mechanics yet and you were assuming that the volume of recent developments made old books obsolete. Maybe in Biology, in Physics getting to recent developments would mean that you're familiar with Goldstein, Landau's Vol. I... Abraham-Marsden? Arnold? Those are old.

Often newer editions actually worsen textbooks and then only a few contemporary books become references in the long run. It's always been like this, there's tons of great books from the 70s that aren't used today and could definitely do. At least they're not ~1,000 pp. of waffle, which is what you usually get for your first textbook on anything nowadays.

Have you looked at for instance Khan Academy's Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown) Math videos? it's really apparent there is a LOT of room for improvement in pedagogy.

As the linked PDF illustrates, most people are teaching along a set formula and sequence of concepts. Good teachers will try to tweak and iterate on these formulas and evolve a better curriculum that sinks in better for students.

Naturally as time goes on, if each author has to start from scratch, then it becomes harder and harder to beat "the best book on BLAH" from the last 100 years. (Though I refuse to believe it's a monumental task to write a better textbook than Rudin)

If you have open copy-left books, then in theory people could start with a Rudin, fork it, tweak it and improve it. 70 years of improvement could yield some amazing forks!

"Often newer editions actually worsen textbooks"

That's typically because they select a random new author to in-effect update their copyright date.. and the new author is rarely of the same caliber as the first

I have. I went through Khan Academy, Brilliant and 3Blue1Brown. After spending more than 100s of hours I started getting the feeling that these are all good for elementary level math.

But for any serious math (think real analysis, complex analysis, group theory and beyond), all these platforms did was leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling of having learnt something cool but in reality that warm fuzzy feeling was not good enough for solving actual exercises that come in textbooks or really deeply understand the material.

I've given up on these online learning media. Back to textbooks. The difference is like night and day.

Critically, you can read/listen to something and come away with the false impression you understand it. Sitting down and doing problem is .. not always fun.. but can be critical for the concepts to sink in. I think this is the main point of what you're saying

I could see in the future it being something like watching a video and then doing a programming exercise

If you want anything past Analysis 1 I think you'll find that universities guard their content.

Not so; there's an absolutely vast amount of freely available undergraduate mathematics resources available at all levels. Honestly, so much that it makes it confusing to choose and not get distracted by the options -- perhaps AI-mediated distillation could be helpful in the future.

I wanted to find good analysis video lectures from a real university complete with problem sets, homeworks and their solutions. I couldn’t. I think MIT OCW now has one analysis course like that, but it’s relatively “recent”.

http://therisingsea.org/post/mast30026/

They have videos as well as everything else. I'd love to study them with someone/some group of people one day.

But, you don't need videos if there are carefully-written course notes PDFs.

Try Oxford: https://courses.maths.ox.ac.uk/course/index.php

E.g. two random Analysis-related courses (second more advanced than first)

https://courses.maths.ox.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=65

https://courses.maths.ox.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=4988

And there are tons of others, but with videos is a bit harder.

Berkeley exam papers with solutions: https://tbp.berkeley.edu/courses/math/113/

Hmm. All the way back to when I was in college there was advanced content available from the Open University. You had to be awake at 2am and it was in black and white, but it was there.

Are there people who think this is an "either/or" choice, as opposed to a "use both" thing?? I ask, because it's pretty well established that learning is enhanced by use of multiple media types and it seems self-evident to me that books and videos are complementary.

Can't speak for others but for me it is more about efficient utilization of time rather than complementing multiple learning methods.

I've found that time spent in learning math from videos have poor return of investment. That time is better spent re-reading a chapter or that thing that I couldn't fully understand the first time and doing more exercises.

On the other hand, there's for instance Optics where you basically have to condense an encyclopaedia and there's always prettier pictures. Or Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics etc that can be taught in different ways depending on the curriculum.

There definitely should be pedagogical considerations in higher education, that's lacking because it's usually an afterthought. And it also should be very clear to people getting into higher education that at some later point pedagogy must end and you have to be capable of working your way through the material.

To my mind, if the textbook was actually excellent then that would be 80%+. We're nowhere near there. I think there is LOT of room for improvement

But sure.. Thermodynamics.. things could be worse :)

Sometimes things are just hard because they're complicated and you need to buckle down and learn your multiplication tables. But at least in my own life experience, the vast majority of the time things are a problem because their poorly explained - often by people that poorly understand it themselves.

Once you truly understand something inside and out - and look back on it - it all generally looks relatively simple. But it takes a special talent to be able to go back and reexplain it from the naiive perspective

That's probably true.

> To my mind, if the textbook was actually excellent then that would be 80%+. We're nowhere near there. I think there is LOT of room for improvement

In my view, that's probably false. I don't think the problem is masochism, gatekeeping, and people holding on to old textbooks. I think the problem is that classical mechanics is actually hard, at least for most people. If you come in to beginning classical mechanics wanting to have learned it, rather than wanting to learn it, no textbook can save you. And I think that many people come in that way. They want it out of the way as a prerequisite for something else, rather than really wanting to know it for itself.

I think you overestimate the capabilities of students entering university (even 20 years ago), and underestimate how poor high schools can be in preparing said students.

I went to a mediocre university. A 50-80% drop out rate was there for both physics and EE - I don't know how it compares to the other engineering. And I did not even consider it challenging. Almost all the classes were a breeze for someone like me who was well prepared going in. At least in that EE department, the teachers were very dedicated to teaching. They would allocate 3-9 hours a week for office hours, and the pace they taught as was slow (probably only covered 70-80% of the material that is covered in a top university).

Students were given lots of chances.

The reasons they drop out are:

- Poor preparation at the high school level

- Poor discipline. A lot of students didn't transition well to independence, and didn't have an authority figure (e.g. parent) controlling their schedule.

- Realizing too late what it means when courses are built on top of other courses. Thus you'd have people getting an A in Calculus I, but almost failing Calculus III because they didn't realize they needed Calculus I beyond the course.

- In high school you can get far with a cursory understanding of the material. At university, you could get a B, or even an A, with that approach for introductory courses, but that approach will start trending towards an F in junior/senior level courses.

Sure, I agree with you that pedagogy can be improved, but I expect that 80% would at best become 60% if all you focus on is pedagogy.

You can't realistically expect that there will always be someone up the ladder to explain things to you. I mean, who explains stuff to the professors if it worked like that?

Even at the research level we are not independent islands of learning and discovery. People collaborate, some pickup certain concepts better than others and vice versa. So we teach and aid each other.

It seems you're firmly against this notion? Or if not please clarify your position?

I think everyone should be capable of working alone as well, and that has been the general assumption around as far as I've noticed. Of course collaboration is usually way more productive and also unavoidable.

But we were talking about education. Theses are individual for a reason.

Yes, you have to shed the expectation that others will teach you, I agree with that. In the end, people slogged through by doing a bunch of reading from various sources. It is maybe the main lesson of university for everyone: you're not in high school anymore, you won't just learn whatever the guy says while talking to you. It's quite the shock if you had actually good teachers at school.

The thing is though, you can still demand good teaching materials. Textbooks have to explain things in the clearest way possible. They shouldn't be confusing, especially considering they end up being the main source for just about everything. In this modern world where there are online lectures and textbooks, there's no reason we can't all have the very best explanations of every relevant concept. Yes, of course as a student you still have to put in the time, but the materials ought to be the very best.

I strongly disagree. All the best math and CS books I have are old.

New books about old topics tend to be less informed about the context and core ideas that led to their development.

There is a study showing that you actually understand material better, if you use the most primitive methods: chalkboard and a lecture. Because you are forced to visualize the material yourself, instead of being presented with a ready-made animation.

It probably makes sense to use visual aids for students that just can't grasp the concept, but I believe this will only help in elementary math.

2. When I struggle with books it is because they do not present the motivation behind what they are doing. Videos and "more popular" articles can both provide the big-picture motivation and overview. Sometimes, you have to construct a motivation for yourself, based on what you read. That's hard. Maybe you even invent something new in order to understand a concept better. This approach is slow, though. It's easier if someone explains to you why a certain concept is "hard" or a point of view from which the concept is "easy".

3. I think students who build on a partial understanding are not going to have a better time with videos. They are in greater need of learning how to learn something than they are of facts, but school does not teach that skill (afaik).

And do the homework problems. You'll never understand the material without doing the problem sets.

The author knew that this book was for people who might be as involved in the business of radio as its science or engineering, so they wrote as much about the application across every industry, breaking down the systems to the component level and manufacturers, deployment, and ordering, as they did the design and theory.

I learned how to evaluate a textbook from its structure and style. It certainly wasn't designed for discrete lessons, and the professor would have needed a diverse and practical understanding to teach it effectively.

I wonder if the same thing isn't happening with computer science. When I started studying the topic in the late 80's, I was part of the earliest generation that actually did, and everything seemed to be explicitly written with the goal of making sense. Some things (like recursion and pointers) were fundamentally complicated, but they were made as simple as they reasonably could be.

My son is studying computer science in college right now and I look at the way they present the material and it often seems designed to confuse - I'll read it over and then explain it to him the way _I_ was taught it and he'll say, "oh my gosh, why don't they explain it that way?"

Take simple arithmetic like 12x17. Some people do the long form multiplication (carry the one..), some people say it's 12x10+12x7. Some remember 12x12 from times tables and go 12x12+12x5. Some people make it 24x8+12 => 48x4+12 => 50x4-8+12 etc. Some do it on the abacus in their heads.

All valid, though some are slightly more optimal than others. Good teachers empower alternative solutions and try to help people connect what they already know to what they already understand.

Oh, and 12×17 = 10×17 + 2×17 = 10×17 + 2×10 + 2×7 = 170 + 20 + 14 = 204.

It's funny that for the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th one physicists were so eager to simplify and generalize their knowledge. With the side-effect of learning quite a few surprising things from the work. And yet for almost a century the goal is explicitly the opposite. (It's almost like if Academia is in crisis...)

But the proof of failure is instructive :)

(serious reply, if it's insufficient for a freshman course i propose following up with Feynman https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Physics-boxed-set/dp..., any objections?)

[1] https://archive.org/details/physics-for-mathematicians-mecha...

It is true that just because a book in newer it is not necessarily pedagogically better

It is also true that a poor selection of content or understanding by the author could doom a book even with better pedagogy.

All that said, I love the idea of OSS books/exercises for teaching - I don't know if a sufficiently engaged and competent (domain + pedagogy) would evolve around and/all of them, but it'd be a fine experiment to try!

It would also be great training material for LLMs to help them to tutor using more thoughtful metaphors and examples.

Besides pedagogy (btw, I have a master on that), in college you have to respect your students as studying adults and give them a proper bibliography, emphasizing references for independent study if they don't like your lecture notes.

What I'm talking about is expanding options to meet additional education needs. Since universities are a shared resource, any solution must be carefully designed to preserve the ability to continue providing existing services. That's difficult to achieve, so I understand the obstructionist response.

All I'm saying is that if you position yourself as an obstructionist, don't be surprised when you're treated like one.

The thing with giving the public what they want and being too much of a pragmatist is that we've seen it before.

Consider Western universities in the 17th century, they were still there churning out degrees, but modern science, mathematics and technology developed elsewhere.

You're right to protect your existing solution against regressions, and there's value in revisiting old topics in the new discussions, but you're not going to constructively contribute much if you're unwilling to engage with why so many people feel the need for something different in the first place.

Interesting to note we haven’t got a text book for these classes just lecture notes and a number of text books recommended if we want additional presentations.

I think people who are frustrated they can't grok diff eq in a n-week course are likewise deluded. There is such a deeper meaning those symbols on the page, and I suspect there is simply no way to spoon feed it.

In a twist of irony anyone could have predicted: this selects for the middle of the bell curve, and not the right-hand tail.

I feel as though there are a set of personality qualities that must not be present in order to achieve anything worthwhile. Wasting time, frivolous activities, and fostering an outsized ego are just a few.

Also, anybody with "street-smarts" can see the cost-benefit ratio and perceive the benefit is kept much smaller than some other, easier subjects, while the cost is artificially inflated.

What it does select is people that really love the subject. And is at least a little bit smarter than average.

I have a PhD in particle physics, and I've been a researcher at CERN with colleagues from multiple countries.

And I cannot understand what you are saying there.

> I have a PhD in particle physics, and I've been a researcher at CERN with colleagues from multiple countries. And I cannot understand what you are saying there.

Hrm.

But I was a researcher at CERN with colleagues from multiple countries, where I turned down an offer to do a PhD in particle physics :-)

(A foolish career decision in retrospect.)

Getting my PhD was not easy for me, as it wasn't for the most people I met, because none of us is a so-called genius. Rather, all of us had to put a lot of effort and discipline in order to move on.

And never did we met any artificial obstacles or deliberate difficulties. Physics is hard; it is as hard as many other academic fields. You need focus, you need discipline, and yes, you need passion to be able to keep focus and discipline.

But you will be welcome if you try, and you will receive a lot of help. Maybe you will find out it was not the right choice for you and you will change your target, but you will not be screened out and rejected just because.

You need people from outside the echo chamber. I found The Open University to be a considerably better education provider on that basis than the red brick I attended quite frankly. The material and tuition is far far far better.

Incidentally your point in Khan Academy is spot on. That's basically OU but the material is miles better and it actually leads to a qualification.

Example free course: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/intr...

I have been a on the mathematics faculty, including at some decent places, for almost 20 years. I have never met a single university mathematics teacher who thought this way. To the contrary, we are delighted when someone shows even a spark of interest or aptitude (hopefully both). Granted there are high bars for reaching professional competence, but that's intrinsic to the subject—and there is a welcoming place, in math probably more than in any physical science, for amateurs as well as professionals.

> As he observed, other departments will step in an do much better. The best linear algebra class I had was a graduate course in the electrical engineering department

It's worth noting that this isn't necessarily because EEs are better teachers—although of course in any particular case they might be—but because they can give you a course more focused on your interests. Math departments wind up teaching many courses populated largely, if not entirely, by non-majors, and we cannot be discipline experts in every field of application in which students might be interested—nor, even if we were, could we simultaneously teach one course in a way that appealed simultaneously and particularly to the diverse applications needed by every student.

I don't know how it is in the Math department, but in Physics there is almost a sort of hazing that goes on, where some subjects are just known for how grueling they are and how you just have to go through it

"To the contrary, we are delighted when someone shows even a spark of interest or aptitude" Not to read too much into it, but this kinda hints at the problem. You're delighted at the students that have passed your IQ test. There is generally very little care given to the 70%+ of students that aren't making the cut. The true horror is how many students are in the class and not getting it. And the teachers are not freaking out

From my university experience (which was a while ago) it was abundantly clear that most students hate their math/physics classes, were bored out of their skulls and the teachers are only interested in the engaged students that are getting it.

What you should be "delighted" by is when you find a new way to explain something that resonates with most of the class

Professors of undergraduates don't seem to think from the undergraduate perspective. Most undergrads have only ever known school, and are just following directions while fumbling their way to their first interview. From that perspective it doesn't make any sense why some classes have to be immensely difficult and high-stakes, and others can be a little easier. From the graduated perspective, you can see "the big well-intentioned lie"--in truth, no field can be condensed into 16 weeks, even if you're studying it and nothing else 14 hours per day. The more difficult a class is, the closer it is to the truth that the class itself is a carefully structured playground, and the real field is more dizzyingly wide and complex than any student can imagine. However, I don't see why this lesson has to be so painful to students.

While there's no excuse for it, I think faculty see so much apathy on such a regular basis that sometimes it's easy to mistake sincere struggle for a lack of desire to engage. For precisely that reason, I try very hard to recognize and reward my students who are willing to take the time to work with me, whatever their existing comfort or proficiency level with the subject is, but I know that there are times (probably many more than I'd like to imagine) when I don't rise to that ideal.

> Professors of undergraduates don't seem to think from the undergraduate perspective. … However, I don't see why this … has to be so painful to students.

I think you might underestimate how painful it is to faculty, too! Most of us are in this for the love of our subject, and many are even in it for the love of teaching, and it's painful to have something that's so beautiful and beloved for us be the cause of suffering in others.

Anyway—while I completely agree that it would be better if the learning experience could be the joy it should be, and free of the pain that it often carries, I do wonder if some of this might be intrinsic. There are certain topics that are just difficult, and on their first encounter with which most learners will find themselves lost and confused. But those topics have to be, or are believed to have to be, understood to be successful in the field, so that loss and confusion will have to be felt some time. Isn't it better if that's in the classroom rather than on the job?

> The more difficult a class is, the closer it is to the truth that the class itself is a carefully structured playground, and the real field is more dizzyingly wide and complex than any student can imagine.

This is a beautiful description. I know as a teacher that I try to communicate this to my students, but also that I surely fail much more often than I succeed.

Thanks. There's an element of hopelessness in trying to explain the immensity of human knowledge to someone who's lived their entire life captured by mandatory schooling. It's just not an interesting thought to most of them. Their worldview has been so artificially limited that attempts to explain the limitations of their circumstances just appear to be more limitations. "Guys, there are more than six hundred thousand mathematicians working right now in the US, and they're working with concepts first thought of as long ago as 3000 BC and maybe earlier!" "Okay, will that be on the test?"

> Isn't it better if that's in the classroom rather than on the job?

If only we were having this conversation in a bar instead of a text forum. That's a huge question and it's clear you're actually interested in talking about your thoughts on it. It's also a subject that interests me.

When you say:

> But those topics have to be, or are believed to have to be, understood to be successful in the field,

I think that's where the big disconnect comes from. What's the point of school? Is it to know enough to be useful at a job, or to plumb the depths of knowledge? Is it some third thing? Ask any recruiter and they'll tell you the new hires aren't prepared to actually do anything useful, and ask any advisor and they'll tell you the new graduate students aren't prepared to actually do anything useful, so we can at least conclude that there's some kind of disconnect going on. Students spend thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars doing something that does not actually adequately prepare them for what people want them for.

I have a hundred different ideas about how to address this. One thought I've been mulling over recently is that a redefinition of grades is in order. From essay that we're commenting on:

"My colleague’s error consisted of believing that the more testable the material, the more teachable it is. A wider spread of performance in the problem sets and in the quizzes makes the assignment of grades “more objective.” The course is turned into a game of skill, where manipulative ability outweighs understanding...

In an elementary course in differential equations, students should learn a few basic concepts that they will remember for the rest of their lives, such as the universal occurrence of the exponential function, stability, the relationship between trajectories and integrals of systems, phase plane analysis, the manipulation of the Laplace transform, perhaps even the fascinating relationship between partial fraction decompositions and convolutions via Laplace transforms. Who cares whether the students become skilled at working out tricky problems? What matters is their getting a feeling for the importance of the subject, their coming out of the course with the conviction of the inevitability of differential equations, and with enhanced faith in the power of mathematics. These objectives are better achieved by stretching the students’ minds to the utmost limits of cultural breadth of which they are capable, and by pitching the material at a level that is just a little higher than they can reach."

At the undergraduate/introductory level, the only important question is "what awareness do you have of the breadth of this field, and what mastery do you have over the concepts that most agree are its "most fundamental"? You and I both agree that class is a "playground", and any "grade" is in fact meaningless. Rather than assigning As, Bs, Cs etc. as a percentile of subjective completion of arbitrary problem sets, As-Fs should be assigned at the discretion of the instructor as a holistic assessment of oral and written examination, completion of problems and problem sets, participation in the class, and general wisdom.

Students would of course resist this. They want to be graded on impartial, meaningless criteria. That's how they're taught from third grade, and it's the method that allows for the least possible interaction with the material. The only reason they want these grading criteria is so they can plan to spend as little time as possible on the class. This method of approaching learning simply has to be broken at every level of education. You shouldn't even have a GPA until college.

I'm not completely sure I agree that this is the solution—if we're re-inventing grades anyway, then I'd like to do something more radical than using the same old A–F and just interpreting them differently (although, even if given free rein to do whatever I liked, I don't know what I would do!)—but I definitely agree that grades, and the standard approach to them, are the most pernicious part of "education" (in the sense of the current schooling system). If there were any way to get away with it, then I would be happy to—indeed, I would prefer to—have all evaluative exercises be diagnostic and informative, only for the students' benefit, and to assign no grade at all, or an A for everyone; but this seems incompatible with a modern university structure (and anyway is essentially forbidden by university administration).

I believe that there is a negative feedback loop in the current model of schooling: unprepared students produce jaded instructors produce unprepared students. The big problem with the current lecture method is that any interruption of the momentum of the course for the students' own personal benefit comes with a social cost, so it's better to just shut up and pretend you know what's going on. Furthermore, many lectures build on themselves, so if you misunderstand a concept at minute 3, by minute 20 you're checked out and by minute 50 you're clock-watching. That's why so many math lectures are silent with the exception of the occasional interjection from a star student.

Combine this with the fact that most students are insufficiently prepared for course material in the first place and you end up with modern STEM college: kids who don't get the material slogging through piles of completion-based assignments and exams and putting in the minimum amount of work to get the degree, after which most get the exact same job they'd have gotten if they'd worked harder anyway. They're almost incentivized against deep examination of any one topic, because all time spent working on one assignment incurs a cost against other assignments, or against leisure.

There are so many issues with the way education works at scale in the first world that going down any pathway would take a thousand words, so I'll sum up by saying that I believe that you have a point, and I also believe that the majority of undergraduates are underprepared, entitled, have underdeveloped work ethics, and lack both the discipline and drive necessary to really get something out of their education. However, I still think that the extreme burn-out classes cause more detriments to higher education than they bring as a whole.

That's because happy students are all alike, but every unhappy student is unhappy in their own way. It's just not feasible to care in depth about why any one of the 70%+ is not learning effectively. They're probably missing something that's effectively a prereq for the class, but that's something that should be addressed by the student themselves.

You are right, and I am! I don't think that's incompatible with also being delighted when someone shows interest or aptitude. In fact, the synergy is the best part, when someone shows interest or aptitude because they are willing to put in the work to follow the pathway that I have tried to open up for them.

It's not so much a habit of being deliberately arcane as, in my opinion at least, badly attempting to keep the sense of the sublime that engineering departments often lose touch with.

I went to a pretty shit physics department, but there were glimpses of beauty. The engineering department was more professional, better run, definitely more fun if you like the thrill of actually making something, but as engineers theory is just a means to an end, so I would've been bored on some fundamental level.

Aside:

As a (I suspect) dyslexia diagnosis in-waiting I am a sucker for really good, crisp typesetting. Old books often struggle with that (e.g. particularly curly non-latin characters are almost unreadable for me), but reasoning is timeless.

Landau & Lifshitz is old, ugly, a bit terrifying, and yet timelessly brilliant. Difficult, but in a physically challenging way rather than the more modern, Grecian-thinking, rigour-by-nomenclature style found in modernity.

[0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/

And even after it burns down the seed of the old curriculum may yet pass into the new.

Even here on HN where I'd expect people to be relatively open to it compared to the population, any slight change proposed will be shouted down about 2-to-1, no matter how absurd the inclusion is, how pointless the schooling actually is, and how observable it is that the matter in question has had its impact entirely dissipated by the age of 25 across the entire population. Curricula are not analyzed by any of the several rational standards I could construct for them. It is only, is that or is that not exactly what I was taught, covered over by one of a handful of thin rationalizations.

Fortunately for the Western system I am not a revolutionary and observe from history that plans that involve burning X down so we can institute the glorious world of Y often succeed in the former and all but inevitably utterly fail in the latter, so it is not a good plan. Nevertheless, it seems to me that in the absence of a frontier to give the middle finger to our entire educational system as they need to pursue some other goals forthwith (space colonies, perhaps, no time to dick around with useless differential equations when I need you to learn the useful ones RIGHT NOW so that the air processing systems start working again), there will be no change to the curriculum anytime soon.

Not that we should give up and resign ourselves to outmoded received pedagogy, but these are hard breaking changes and we should set our expectations accordingly.

I enjoyed the book and class myself but it did not make me a better physicist, just a better mathematician

Did you go to a top university? And did you study physics in grad school? I find this statement amusing given how easy the undergrad curriculum was compared to grad school physics.

In my undergrad, physics was challenging only in that you needed a good command of the mathematics. If you had that, the actual instruction (and textbooks) were of average difficulty.

But again, experience may vary from university to university. Certainly I can see professors who could have made it much tougher if they wanted to.

As for the rest of your comments in this thread: Sorry, but to me this is another HN thread where people insist it can be taught better, and teachers are being irresponsible in not finding such approaches, but with very little actual proof that it can be as good as imagined. It's not like you have concrete examples of better pedagogy to pointed out.

Undergrad textbooks in Physics may be somewhat challenging. But the graduate texts (at least in theoretical Physics) tend to be MUCH harder, especially if your undergrad degree didn't include several courses of abstract algebra and topology.

Ideally, physicists should have Geometric Algebra (Clifford Algebra) as part of their undergraduate classes. But at least when I went to Uni, there was no space in the undergrad tracks for this level of math.

> I had a lot of hope for things like Khan Academy, but the issue is video is not text and it's hard to iterate and improve on.

Not the issue.

> I really wish textbooks with open licenses would take over and they could be reworked and improved year after year by different people

The issue.

There actually isn't even a good open content license, analogous to the GPL-style licenses. Improving on video means having access to the source files. Ditto for interactive activities. Khan Academy is designed to look as open as possible, while withholding just enough and being just mean enough with license to make any sort of reuse a hopeless endeavor.

With the proper piece in place, video is very possible to iterate upon.

Could anyone explain to me how they think this might work in practice?

I am presently producing an undergrad textbook in quantum theory. I have two motivations: 1. IMO the "qubits first" (ie teach finite-dimensional QM before wave mechanics) approach to introducing the theory is superior (basically only Feynman did it of all the "classic" books) and 2. I'm involved in third world education and I want the book to be freely downloadable.

Now its a lot of work despite having taught the course multiple times and produced comprehensive lecture notes etc. Once its done I am sure I will not have the time to keep updating it, expanding on the problem sets and so on. A former student on the course is helping with the conversion and he will be a co-author, but like me he sees it as a service not at all about producing a product. So I think we're both very open to the idea of such "open license".

Given all that here are the kinds of questions that immediately arise:

- Mechanically how should one make the book available for such re-working? Put the source files on github? (Not something I've ever used, but I know roughly how it works).

- Via what mechanism does someone get to be credited for work they might do on better versions?

- Who decides what is the current "definitive" or "best" version? I will have a separate website for the book so I guess new versions can be announced there. But one way or the other I won't be involved forever.

- QM is fraught with crackpots, people who have whacky ideas on how to explain things and so on. Can they be prevented from "taking over", rewriting large chunks into (what I would view as) nonsense and so on? Note that presumably my name would still be associated with the new versions, so the issue is primarily not lending credence to stuff I fundamentally disagree with, not that they shouldn't be allowed to go do their thing.

- We will make a POD service available for purchasing hardcopies, the (expected to be small) royalties from which would be donated to third world physics/math education. Is there some license that can ensure any subsequent use of the material is also similarly non-profit?

I can see some (though not perfect) analogies with open-source software, so perhaps someone here has useful ideas about this kind of thing already...