That's how I feel every time I stumble into a math thread. It's always interesting to see real people discuss this stuff. Like, I don't have any close friends who have likely multipled a matrix in the last year or probably decade. It seems so far away from ordinary life.

Then you go on HN and there are people just casually chatting about it. They're speaking English but neither the words nor the relation to other words means anything to the uninitiated.

But then there's a few that stand out, like someone will say "You don't really need Bloof tensors, you can model it just as well as a Randolph set of quadrispheres", and it's recognizable as technical discussion comparing the merits of models, but thats about it.

Me IRL. I like to think of myself as a reasonably clever person, multidisciplinary science nerd. Not unusual for me to comfortably read through papers in acoustics, astrophysics, applied math, computer science, biology...

This abstract is like a nice swift kick.... :)

After spending a while looking up terms and hurting my head I'm reminded how much I hate quantum. Bullshit academics trying to make particles out of the acoustic waves I know and love. ;)

I have a PhD in Physics and got a little lost in the abstract myself, so don’t feel bad! It’s very dense sentences with pretty technical jargon. After a few re-reads and spot checking some forgotten condensed matter terms of art it made (some) sense.