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Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Another concrete example of the conflict is classical vs quantum physics which is nearly exclusively taught as the historical story of the quantum revolution or whatever you call it around 1900.

It would be trivial to skip the historical story and just "yo here's a FET transistor, a solar cell, and a vacuum tube, and the math just works, so get used to it" but nobody is ever taught that way.

Would be interesting for someone to attempt to write a non-historical physics textbook.

On the other hand, in IT, this style of learning is considered normal. "This is how the kool kids do things today. The past does not matter and probably didn't exist anyway. The end."

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>On the other hand, in IT, this style of learning is considered normal. "This is how the kool kids do things today. The past does not matter and probably didn't exist anyway. The end."

And yet nand2tetris is one of the most common suggestions for people who actually want to figure out how computers work. Because you actually are posed with problems that real world engineers used to struggle with, and are allowed to play with the problem before finding out the answer. It builds a much deeper understanding than "it works like this because it is"

But nand2tetris doesn't have a historical approach if i'm not mistaken.

A downside to the modern approach is that “plug the equations into a computer and let it churn for a bit” plays a big role I think. This is seems a bit annoying from a teaching point of view

* “here’s what the computer came up with” doesn’t really build as much intuition as doing the equations out by hand

* there’s enough material in “how to plug it into a computer and make it run quickly” for a whole degree

> Would be interesting for someone to attempt to write a non-historical physics textbook.

I recall some prominent physicist saying they've never read Einstein's original papers on relativity; and they don't have any real desire to, since we understand it much better now, and have better examples, notations, etc.

Most physicists have never read them, fwiw, as interesting as they may be for their historical role. Most classic papers go unread, and it’s not a bad thing pedagogically. How things get sorted out is usually a huge mess and following the real history can be an enormous distraction (and can confuse and misdirect students).

While that is true, I would highly encourage everyone to read the original EPR (Einstein Podolski Rosen) it is so amazingly clear in its writing and can be understood even by laymen.

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