I had to get up to date with general and physical chemistry over the last few months for my graduate studies; my background is in theoretical physics and I've not taken any chemistry above GCSEs.
I spent my nights working through a couple of chemistry textbooks and man, I loved it. It's an exquisitely complex subject: I wouldn't call it elegant, but there's an intrinsic beauty in the sheer practicality of it.
A lot of very, very smart people I've spoken to - most of whom had taken chemistry for A-levels - have found it odd that I've enjoyed it so much. Their memories of the subject are in complete contradiction to mine (literally speaking, because they associate chemistry with memorisation).
The difference, I think, is the fact that my introduction to chemistry came after I became competent with quantum and statistical physics: the fundamental topics of physics from which chemistry as a whole springs forth. Now that I think about it, the introductory chemistry book I studied at first would have been unbearably frustrating if all I had to work with were constitutive relations and hand-wavy arguments.
I feel like there's quite a lot scope for engineering the levels of intelligence within a given population.
To my knowledge, most languages spoken throughout the world reached their current forms naturally, without any kind of deliberate influence by their speakers. What if, however, a language was actively designed to be as information dense as possible? What effect would it have on the average intelligence of a population in which said language was gradually introduced to the point where children were raised speaking it?
My family seriously struggled with cash when I was younger. Naturally, I never had any of the expensive toys that were all the rage with my peers.
What I did have was books. My dad would go to a second-hand book store every day and pick out books that he thought I'd like. My dad couldn't read English very well, so I ended up getting a bunch of books that were definitely not intended for my age bracket - encyclopaedias, novels, textbooks (including a massive textbook on American law that I still have, despite the fact that I live in the UK) and so on.
Everything good about me as a person is a direct result of what my dad did for me back then.
How uncanny. I was thinking about this in one of my lectures today after seeing that my lecturer spelt "online" as "on line" in one of his presentation slides.
It turns out that the origin of the term "on line" dates back all the way to the telegraph industry!
A lot of very, very smart people I've spoken to - most of whom had taken chemistry for A-levels - have found it odd that I've enjoyed it so much. Their memories of the subject are in complete contradiction to mine (literally speaking, because they associate chemistry with memorisation).
The difference, I think, is the fact that my introduction to chemistry came after I became competent with quantum and statistical physics: the fundamental topics of physics from which chemistry as a whole springs forth. Now that I think about it, the introductory chemistry book I studied at first would have been unbearably frustrating if all I had to work with were constitutive relations and hand-wavy arguments.