in truth, i don't have much to say at all.....
i have a physics background; i've seen these equations before, and the general physics isn't new to me. but, the courses i took were not as formal as this, they just skipped over this kind of kantian approach to the foundations of quantum mechanics as this kind of synthetic linear algebra and went right to the calculus and statistics. i took years worth of abstract algebra, though. so, i was actually maybe the best possible audience for the lecture series, in a sense, as i had already seen all of the math and had already seen all of the physics, and had even taken formal courses in euclidean & non-euclidean geometry, i just hadn't seen anybody put them together to explicitly lay out the theory.
as it was only the formal foundations that i hadn't seen before, it's really only the first couple of lectures that were worth commenting on, and i've already done that. i don't have any particular criticism of harmonic oscillators or the schrodinger equation, it's the underlying system of algebra that i wonder about, as it is rooted in kantian assumptions that were eventually absolutely savaged by gauss (and friends) and reversed to form the basis of relativity, by einstein (and minkowski). susskind knows that. so, what the fuck is he even doing?
i was hoping that the course would carry on long enough to bring me to a point where i could say "aha! parallelism! foiled!", but, as it is, all i can do is sort of pointlessly draw attention to deficits in the model, which i've already done. the thing is that proving that a model has flaws doesn't actually mean anything. all models have flaws, and we know that something is going to need to break before we can unify physics. i think the quantum model seems less compelling than relativity, but that's just my opinion.
i mentioned it before, so i'll just summarize it here: the biggest thing i pulled out from watching this is wondering if these minor fluctuations in the "imaginary direction" (by tiny factors of planck's constant) are not merely relics of the broken underlying geometry, and i wonder if the error terms would disappear or otherwise align themselves with the other branches if we were sure we understood the underlying geometry better.
maybe einstein had the answer right in front of him the whole time, even if he didn't quite know how to tweak it. but, i mean, that's the fields medal question, right?
he didn't mention bell's theorem, so i'll skip over it for now.
lecture series number two is classical mechanics, and i initially wondered if it was worthwhile, but, after watching the first lecture, i'm going to carry through with it. again: i've taken all the classical mechanics, but he's going at it with these weird kantianisms again, in an apparent attempt to derive newton's equations from the underlying quantum theory, and i'd like to see where he's going with it. i hope he goes full out and doesn't dumb it down, as that is something i'd like to see done explicitly, rather than merely waved off as saying "classical mechanics exists in the limit", or whatever.
the last of the previous:
and the first of the new: