Comments by "Gilad Barlev" (@GSBarlev) on "" video.

  1. My least favorite physics professor revolved his whole teaching style around epistemology and basically saying: "Everything you've ever been taught is wrong. Nothing is truly knowable. There is no 'fundamental truth.' There's just math that works and mental models that help us remember that math." Looking back, he was the one professor who influenced me most profoundly, and I wish I'd taken more courses with him.
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  2. Brian Greene has this beautiful analogy in The Elegant Universe where he explains Special Relativity by showing how time dilation and Lorenz contraction can be derived if you think of time as a spatial dimension and all particles as having a fixed "speed" of c (with "rest" being traveling parallel to the "time" axis). I fell in love with this interpretation and solved all of my homework problems at the start of Physics 240 using this framing. My professor hated it and docked points on a few occasions, even though I kept getting the right answer. He tried explaining to me that the concept was wrong and that this was a habit I needed to break. I finally, though reluctantly, gave up, and if I hadn't, I would have been completely on my own (and likely at a dead end) if I'd tried to extrapolate the metaphor to more advanced concepts in relativity. tl;dr—thanks for the tough love, Prof. Jan Kmetko, and I'm sorry I was such a pain in the toucans as a student
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