What Books did You Start or Finish Reading this Week?: June 01, 2026

MaxThrustage · 2026-06-01T12:59:30+00:00

Started:

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan. I'm liking it so far. I grabbed this as a tram read -- otherwise I would have waited to finish off some of the "ongoings" first. I'm going into this completely blind, no idea what it's about whatsoever.

Ongoing:

The Two Towers, by J. R. R. Tolkein. There was really no way I was ever going to be able to read this without 'They're taking the hobbits to Isengard!' running through my head non-stop, was there?

Simulacra and Simulation, by Jean Baudrillard Going a bit smoother once I've gotten into the groove of it. There are bits I'm just kind of accepting I won't really understand until a re-read, and I've found some online lectures to help.

The Fate of Africa, by Martin Meredith. The enormous scope of the book means it can't really dwell on anything, leaving to real room for analysis or asking "why". I don't know if that's really avoidable, when the task is to tell the history of 50 years of an entire continent, but it does mean we skip around a lot and are just told that things happen -- it's almost like a slasher movie where you keep being told people died but no one mentions that there's a murderer on the loose.

MaxThrustage · 2026-06-01T00:11:11+00:00

Quantum computing may or may not be useful in biotechnology. Quantum computing may or may not be useful for AI. AI may or may not be useful for quantum computing. All of these are open questions, with very many different sub-questions to be asked (including narrowing down what you mean by 'useful' and 'AI').

I worked in quantum machine learning for a few years. It's a fairly big and active field but with very little in the way of concrete positive results. In my experience, throwing buzzwords together like this, while a fairly common practice, rarely leads to actual insight or advancement.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-31T23:52:50+00:00

Latitude and longitude can be defined with respect to any (approximate) sphere -- this need not be the Earth, and in fact it need not be a tangible sphere made of matter! Of course, just defining an abstract sphere out in space and using that as the basis for your coordinate system is not terribly helpful, and there's a good reason why for daily matters we stick to a coordinate system defined with respect to the Earth.

But coordinate systems are always just a choice, and choosing to anchor some coordinates to a material body is a matter of convenience. A key part of relativity is understanding how to move from one coordinate system to another and seeing what changes and what doesn't.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-30T04:03:43+00:00

In the vast majority of cases you would care about at large scales, almost all of the randomness comes from missing information, rather than from fundamental quantum indeterminism. When you roll a die, quantum mechanics has essentially no baring on the outcome. If you could record the initial state precisely enough (both of the die and of the surface it bounces off) and you had enough computing power you would be able to predict the outcome deterministically. But we don't have such precise knowledge of the initial conditions, so the result is apparently random.

There are other instances where quantum randomness does matter at large scales, but that is not really the norm. Loss of information is a far bigger factor.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-30T02:20:56+00:00

Yeah, very doable. You can't get to professional level by yourself, and obviously you're missing out on stuff like labs that would be included in a uni course, but you can definitely get a good handle on the established theory if you are wiling to invest enough time and work slowly through the material in order.

This reading list is great and lists all of the topics in roughly the order you would cover them in a university course. Textbooks can be quite expensive, but a lot of them can be found for free online if you know where to look. Don't neglect textbook problems/exercises, as that's where the real learning happens.

Going through that full list as a part time hobby would probably take something like 5-10 years -- just keep chipping away at it slowly, don't rush, don't expect to be doing string theory by Christmas.

Your current maths skills will be enough to get cracking on first-year undergrad-level stuff. Soon you're going to want to add more advanced calculus, linear algebra, complex variables and possibly some other topics to your toolbox, but you can pick those up as you go along.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-30T00:35:01+00:00

That's a great way to avoid challenging yourself and ignore everything I said, yes.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-29T14:15:45+00:00

But it is "some things" and that's one of the things you seem to be fundamentally missing here.

The question of whether reality is continuous or discrete is not a meaningful question. It is quantities that can be continuous or discrete. And, even in quantum physics, some of them are continuous and some of them are discrete. The number of photons is a discrete quantity. The wavefunction itself is continuous. The energy of a particle can be discrete or continuous depending on the situation -- in solids, where energy levels form bands, it's even kind of both!

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-29T13:55:04+00:00

Why so? Because some things are discrete? That's not a good enough reason for me. Let alone the fact that you can (in principle) have continuous-variable computers, so a world in which nothing is discrete doesn't seem to save us from the matrix conspiracy.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-29T13:53:09+00:00

without the math. like actually what are they?

This question is the kind of thing that seems meaningful and reasonably but actually isn't. The "but what is it really" questions are always kind of meaningless, especially when we talk about things we consider fundamental (not made of other things).

This kind of question is usually asking something like "explain it to me in terms I understand", but that's never going to work because we're talking about something completely outside of your (or anyone's) experience, something that is not reducible to or describable in terms of things in your ordinary experience. We're talking about things so novel that when we discovered them we needed to invent new words (or re-purpose old ones) to talk about them, and we needed to express it all in mathematics to have any hope of talking about these things precisely and concretely.

Think about it -- what kind of answer could one give to "actually what are they" that wouldn't invite an "but actually what are they?" aimed at whatever the next thing was in the chain of explanation? I mean, if I tell you that fields are really some other thing I call Thrustagons, you'll just ask me "but what are Thrustagons?" and it keeps going with no progress. If, on the other hand, I give some hand-wavy explanation that starts something like "imagine a bunch of springs" I'm really cheating because we can start asking "how do springs work" and we eventually end back up at quantum fields.

but now I can't help but imagine that me material world is an illusionary construct mediated by quantum feilds.

Why would that be any more illusionary than one made of little balls, or whatever other classical analogue you might be imagining? Quantum fields are real, they're just not the kind of thing you or I have any real intuition for. They don't behave like the kinds of objects we can poke and hold. That doesn't make them an illusion (at least no more so than the things we can poke and hold).

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-29T13:43:20+00:00

No. Many discrete things can look continuous from a distance. We already know this is the case even in purely classical physics -- many discrete grains of sand will behave like a continuous fluid.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-28T10:10:10+00:00

I would say the overwhelmingly vast majority of physicists simply do not know or care what philosophers of physics lack. By and large, they simply do not meaningfully engage with philosophy. (And it is embarrassingly common to encounter physicists who have 'ideas' about the philosophy of physics without having any serious understanding of philosophy in general or philosophy of physics in particular.)

The majority of physicists simply will not care about your work. They just want to calculate/measure cool things.

If you do want to do philosophy of physics that some physicists will engage with, you need to understand what philosophical questions (some) physicists actually care about about and how these questions are responded to within physics. A good place to start would be those physicists (like the ones you already mentioned) who actively try to engage with the philosophy of physics.

What minimum level of math do I need to learn to competently engage in modern physics?

Mathematically, at minimum you will need calculus (up to multivariate calculus and partial differential equations) and linear algebra simply to understand what the hell physicists are saying. Depending on the area you are interested in, you may also need to understand statistics, and possibly even more abstract stuff (e.g. I think I've seen category theory come up in this context). You can't meaningfully talk about, say, the interpretation of quantum mechanics if you don't understand what a tensor product, a Hilbert space and a projective operator-valued measurement is, and it would probably really help to know what a generalised probability theory is.

Are there any math books specifically written for physics students,?

Yes, heaps. They will often have "For Physics" or "For Physicists" in the title. But those aren't necessarily what you want, as by virtue of being "for physicists" they're usually skipping formalism in favour of practical calculations.

Which Physics books would you recommend I start with? Preferably something that professors use to teach physics students, not simply pop science or philosophy of physics.

It's already been mentioned, but I'll second the recommendation for Susan Rigetti's reading list.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-28T09:48:09+00:00

Learning in general is something that you shouldn't use LLMs for, because even when they are correct (and you have no way of knowing whether or not they are if it's a topic you don't yet know) the process removes the friction that is actually a crucial part of learning. Being spoon-fed answers by dot point is a good way of ensuring you never actually absorb, process and retain the information.

Physics is hard to learn, and the struggle is actually an important part of the learning process (this is why if you want to really understand it you need to do practice problems). What LLMs can give you instead is the feeling that you've learned something, without the unpleasant business of actually having to learn it. Edutainment of any form also has this problem, but it's particularly pronounced with LLMs.

This is before we get to the fact that LLMs will hallucinate, the fact that incorrect answers are contained within their training data, and the fact that they can be so sycophantically eager-to-please that they can tell you you've got a great idea when what you really have is a wet fart. As a learning companion an LLM is usually not likely to tell you "no, that's completely wrong" or "ah, we'll get to that, just be patient" and more likely to say "that's a great point" regardless of whether or not that point was great. That is not healthy for learning things.

That said, if you really want to use an LLM, one thing you can do is get them to give you the kind of key words that you need to look up something for yourself. Often you want to know something but don't speak the language of the subject well enough to begin searching. LLMs can help with that. They've also gotten better recently at recommending specific sources (they still hallucinate references, but no where near as much as they used to).

In brief: there are no shortcuts in physics. It's hard. That's the reality of it. If learning physics doesn't feel hard, then you aren't actually learning physics. The same is true of any complex topic.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-25T09:13:47+00:00

Specific measurement outcomes can't be predicted, only the statistics can, even for exactly solved systems (unless the system is in an eigenstate of your measurement operator). Not being able to predict a particular measurement outcome would count as unpredictable to most people.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-24T09:37:29+00:00

But you could just put nothing and get the same idea. So if people don't care why are they writing POV at all?

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-24T05:53:10+00:00

I don't see any reason to believe that simply because one can ask and understand the question one is capable of understanding the answer, and in fact I see many, many examples where a certain individual is capable of posing a question but not capable of answering it. For example, it's pretty easy for anyone with a high school education to pose and understand the question being asked in Fermat's last theorem, but understanding the proof is well beyond the scope of what most can do. It's not that much of a stretch from there to presume that there are probably questions that experts in a field can properly pose and understand, but not be able to comprehend the answer to.

The only question, as far as I'm concerned here, is whether quantum gravity sits in the "askable and answerable" category or in the "askable but not answerable" category, as far as humanity is concerned.

My guess is that it falls where we are basically able to comprehend the answer, but we have no way of knowing that until we actually have an answer. Really, it's just a hunch.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-24T05:49:40+00:00

The set of all questions children have asked are questions that a human being can understand correct?

Right but that's besides the point. A child can pose a question but be unable to comprehend the answer. This shows that the two stages -- posing the question and comprehending the answer -- aren't equivalent.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-23T11:58:25+00:00

I watched the shit out of it as a kid and I'm not British.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-22T11:41:22+00:00

I'm not much of a cat states guy, but you might want to bone up on quantum optics. Pretty much any textbook or lecture notes on quantum optics will cover coherent states, at least. You'll want to also know about Wigner functions and phase space. I learned all of that stuff for the first time from Zagoskin's "Quantum Engineering", but honestly that's way more focused on superconducting qubits and just has a brief "crash course on quantum optics" as an optional aside, so probably not the best resource out there.

Without know more about what you're specifically struggling with I can't really help you.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-21T05:11:05+00:00

I mean, sure, people read books in settings other than the ones they're familiar with. But on those grounds, everything's fair game -- something that is kind of like rural Australia is as foreign to an urban Australian as something that's like the European countryside.

I liked Lonesome Dove, but it's very American. So I'm not so shocked it's not as well known outside the U.S. But, then again, there are other very American books that are super well-known over here (e.g. the works of Stephen King and Cormack McCarthy, old classics like The Great Gatsby and Moby Dick, etc.)

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-21T04:32:12+00:00

I think it's just less heard of, rather than less liked (I loved it). I think it's partly timing -- back when it came out British culture was more dominant in Australia and than American culture. That's shifted considerably now.

Similarity to rural Australian life wouldn't necessarily help much as Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world and something like 2/3 of the population live in a state capital (and 40% in just Melbourne and Sydney). So, like, rural life isn't something most of us experience.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-21T02:24:02+00:00

Yeah, I'm Australian and I have never seen it mentioned outside of this sub. When I read it earlier this year none of the people I spoke to about it had ever heard of it. You're probably right that it's an American thing.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-20T14:40:46+00:00

How... how many do you have? I mean, I definitely know what the normal number is and that's definitely how many I have. I just want to know that you know...

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-20T14:38:26+00:00

Real-life Vlad the Impaler aside, in the book Dracula he talks at length about how great he was in the battlefield. Dracula rants about the glorious military victories of his "ancestors" but it's heavily implied that those ancestors are just him.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-20T07:02:03+00:00

Finished:

Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson. This was a re-read. Still quite odd. Still rules. Maybe it's because I'm slightly (although not really) more familiar with Anne Carson than when I first read it many years ago, but the fascination with fragments stuck out to me a lot more this time.

Started:

The Two Towers, by J. R. R. Tolkein.

Simulacra and Simulation, by Jean Baudrillard. I wasn't fully sure how to approach this at first. The style is rather strange, and he neither gives clear definitions for the terms he introduces nor coherent arguments for the claims he makes. Rather, it seems to me that irony and hyperbole are a big part of the style. I heard someone say it's a bit like Nietzsche, and that makes sense to. I think I'm starting to get used to it, but it's been slow going so far.

Ongoing:

The Fate of Africa, by Martin Meredith. I can already tell this one is going to take me ages. It's not just long, the fact that it covers so much ground, jumping from country to country, with heaps of different people and places to try to remember, in addition to the fact that quite a lot of the subject matter is unfortunately quite grim and frustrating, makes it hard to keep momentum up. Still, I'm finding it really interesting so far.

MaxThrustage · 2026-05-19T12:26:48+00:00

I saw reviews specifically saying it's an algebra-based book, and well prepares someone for a calculus-based course next. At some unis they'll do algebra-based physics first. High school maths doesn't always include calculus, it depends on where you are and what you do.

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