I Don't Understand Quantum Physics (2018)
- ID
- 39128
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 24 Oct 2026, 5:53 PM
- Fetched
- 25 Oct 2026, 1:37 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~doug/quantum_physics/index.html
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 2.5
- Created
- 25 Oct 2026, 1:37 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learners
What happened
A 2018 long-form explainer by Douglas Ross, hosted on a University of Southampton personal page, laid out as roughly 20 chapters running from classical physics and the experiments that broke it, through wave-particle duality, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, quantum tunnelling, superposition and wavefunction collapse, to interpretations, hidden variables, and a glossary plus formulae and references. The excerpt itself is only the table of contents, so no specific claims, numbers, or conclusions from the body are visible here. It drew 206 points and 146 comments on Hacker News.
Why it matters
There is no concrete action for a builder in this text: it is a physics primer with no code, tooling, model, pricing, or policy detail, and the excerpt stops at the chapter list. Read it only if you want background for judging quantum-related claims in vendor pitches or 'quantum-inspired' AI marketing; it will not change anything you ship this week, and the Malaysia angle is nil.
Discussion angle
The comment thread is the real artifact here (146 comments on a table of contents): worth asking the room which explainer formats actually got a hard concept to stick for them, and whether the 'I Don't Understand X' framing is more useful than the textbook order Ross uses.