I'm Jakob, a physicist. I like making sense of something difficult, breaking it into understandable pieces, and then teaching it to others.
Most of my projects follow this idea from Edwin Jaynes:
The goal should be, not to implant in the students' mind every fact that the teacher knows now; but rather to implant a way of thinking that enables the student, in the future, to learn in one year what the teacher learned in two years. Only in that way can we continue to advance from one generation to the next.
Latest essays
- The Trouble With AI
- Wild Universities
- Alternative Interpretations of Special Relativity
- Impossible Assumptions
- What Foundational Questions Are Worth Asking?
- The 5 Best Books to Learn Quantum Mechanics
- Slowness is a Virtue
- What Scientific Ideas Are Worth Pursuing?
- The Cage of Casualness
- In Praise of Amateurism
Older essays, 2014 to 2020 →
Books and projects
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A textbook that derives modern physics from symmetry considerations. 10,000+ downloads, reviewed by the MAA, zbMATH, Physik Journal and Physik in unserer Zeit. German edition published by Springer Spektrum.
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Student-friendly textbooks on Classical Mechanics, Electrodynamics, Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory, each a #1 or #3 bestseller in its Amazon category.
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An expository physics wiki with explanations at increasing levels of sophistication. 500+ contributors, #1 on Hacker News. Whitepaper.
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The structure of general relativity and gauge theories, explained with a simple financial toy model.
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A handbook on how to learn physics.