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184 points mikhael | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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Razengan ◴[] No.45661030[source]
I've been trying to understand as much of "maths" as I can (now enough to write that in quotes, as there isn't a "single" maths) and still a layman, I love reading about discoveries like these, and the fact that you still can have discoveries in things thought to be so fundamental..
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dist-epoch ◴[] No.45661239[source]
Neat factoid: there is something special about rotations in 3D. They are not "simply-connected", which means that there are 2 distinct classes of rotations. And this property is deeply important in quantum physics.
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dandanua ◴[] No.45661490[source]
It's a bit more complicated than "2 classes of rotations", though there is magic indeed. I've tried to explain it in this post https://dandanua.github.io/2021/08/23/the-spin-of-a-human-bo...
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dist-epoch ◴[] No.45661568[source]
There is also this one, which goes into a lot of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7OIbMCIfs4

Unfortunately this subject is above my pay grade, so I gave up :)

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1. Razengan ◴[] No.45666762[source]
> Unfortunately this subject is above my pay grade, so I gave up :)

Don't feel like that. Even though I'm still a complete layman in everything with massive imposter syndrome, I never felt like I would "never" understand something, because some part of my brain intuitively realizes that if other humans were able to figure something out then I should be able to too.

If something doesn't make sense, it's because I haven't take the same "journey" from the point of view of those scientists who did, I'm just seeing the end result without everything that it's built from and on, and that's where the investment of time and effort comes in, which I am OK with not putting in for things that aren't immediately relative to me, but it's certainly not an "intelligence ceiling".