What's one thing your learned at college/university that blew your mind?

You can calculate how long a pencil can stand on its tip before falling using quantum physics.

Basically a version of this was on our freshman accelerated physics final, and no one got it right so our professor happily explained it to us the next day.

It was pretty much the same as is described here.

https://thephysicsvirtuosi.com/posts/old/how-long-can-you-balance-a-quantum-pencil/

Whether or not an irregular verb retains its irregularity depends largely on how much it is used in everyday life. If it's a common word, it's more likely to stay irregular, because we're frequently reminded of the "correct" form. If it's a rare word, the irregularity tends to disappear over time because we simply forget. That's why "to be" couldn't be more irregular (it's used enough to retain its forms) and the past participle of "to prove" is slowly becoming regular "proved" (it's rare enough to be forgotten).

yes i like language very much

Edit: typo

One of the most accurate and successful theories in physics contains the single worst prediction and isn't mathematically rigorous at all.

Doing calculations with it feels like doing vibes based maths, and you spend a lot of time doing things like: "oops divided by zero guess I'll cancel it out by multiplying by zero" and it works.

I learned women actually don't have the same access to higher education as men. That misogyny and rape culture is real and heavily affect people's lives in present day. And that it's about isolated incidents with bad apples, but about the structures around bad incidents, and how they systematically facilitate bad situations, don't help or silence victims.

I genuinely believed it was safe to give my peers the benefit of the doubt and assume that their ironically bigoted jokes weren't their actual views. And it was heartbreaking to realize that that is not an assumption you can make. You don't know people's values unless they tell you, seriously and genuinely, straight from the heart. You cannot infer values from ironic jokes, and you cannot assume that the nice people around you share your core values, that you'd otherwise take for granted that everyone but lunatics agree with. You don't know before you ask.

I learned that humor isn't always innocent. That not everyone who hears you make an "ironically bigoted" joke laughs because of its absurdity - they laugh because they agree. They think you agree with their bigoted views and values, and your joke further cements their worldview, that everyone thinks like them, everyone else is just too scared to say it openly. That jokes can be used as a weapon to create a culture where i.e. overt "ironic" racism is considered normal, and genuine conversations about real racism is taboo.

None of this was in the curriculum. It came from experiencing the social setting and viewing the effects of a broken administrative system at an "elite" engineering college.

I was not a feminist when I walked into my STEM education, and I was when I left.

That Earth was in fact way older than 6000 years.

That the diesel engine wasn’t originally ran on diesel fuel. (In college I was led to believe that it was hemp oil). It was actually peanut oil and later they tried hemp oil.

Shale tastes like mud, yes, but it has the consistency of a chocolate bar if you eat a little.

Honestly not bad. Great experience.

My highschool friends weren't really friends, just people who'd been temporarily thrown into the same unfortunate position as me.

That I am way stupider than I thought I was. No seriously, constantly failing and seeing how little I actually know made me question my life choices.

Just how greedy some professors can be.

Like the one that had a publishing deal with Pearson. He wrote his own textbook, charged $700 for it, then made you remove parts from the book so it made used copies of the book worthless.

It has been proven that each mathematical reasoning system* either has a statement that cannot be proven true or false, or a statement that can be proven both true or false. In simpler terms, it has been proven that we can't prove everything.

Gödels incompleteness theorem if anyone wants to look it up.

• only holds for reasoning systems that can reason about numbers

Nothing mind blowing? Only mind blowing course was Sociology. My professor worshipped Bernie Sanders and I appreciated him engaging his students to do better.

But also, That succeeding in college/university just shows that someone can learn, follow instructions, work in a group, etc. It really is to prepare someone to show up and do the work. I mean everyone is different and there's just more likelihood of someone being a better person to work with than someone who doesn't have that structure or ability to absorb info and think.

I don't think necessarily that people need higher education but it helps. I tell people I think careerwise it helps to have at least two of the three:

• skills
• networking/network
• higher education

Know college isn't for some people and the people I know that are successful are often very skilled or/and have connections, can make connections to get employed where they are.

Oh and STEM though, I think people 100% need college/university for more specialized fields and STEM like medical professionals, physicists, etc.

That teaching isn't the point. It's getting research grants or funding. So much energy was spent on that. Students came 2nd.

I know people's experience varies on this but I absolutely hated high school, and only discovered that I enjoyed learning as a process because of uni. And I'd probably still be small minded and somewhat bigoted if I hadn't gone. Simply because it forced me to critically evaluate my own views and also exposed me to a number of types of people I wouldn't have encountered otherwise.

It's a shame it's so expensive in some countries, because I think it's important to have a well-educated society more broadly.

Functions on real numbers are incredibly werid.

There are continuous but nowhere differentiable functions.

There are continuous and monotonically increasing function that goes from 0 to 1 (i.e. surjective function [0,1] →[0,1]), that "almost never" increases; specifically, if you pick a point at random, that point will be flat on said function with probablity exactly 1 (not almost 1, but exactly 1, no approximation here).

More impressively, you can have function that is continuous, but you cannot find a connected path on it (i.e. not path connected). In plain word, if anyone told you "a function is continuous when you can draw it without lifting your pen". They have lied to you.

EDIT: the last one (crossed out) is wrong. Intuitively "topologists' sine curve" contains two parts; you can neither find a distinct seperation for them (i.e. "connected"), nor can you draw a path that connects the two part (i.e. not "path connected"). However, topologist's sine curve is not the graph of a continuous function.

Being able to communicate effectively is critical in a public speaking role. Sadly, I learned this in the inverse - class was taught by a TA who didn't speak English, professor was never available, whole class failed, no one cared. Still fills me with rage to this day. But, it did make me a better public speaker, so I guess that's something.

A lot of things from my Philosophy and Literature class:

In the Old Testament (or at least Genesis) a man’s semen is literally a bunch of little hims and thus impregnating a woman with a son is creating a new him, and something went wrong if it’s a daughter. Obviously that’s wrong, but if I pretend to go back in time to when nobody knew anything about biology beyond the super obvious, it makes a very basic sort of sense. More importantly, it has provided me with a lot of context for why Abrahamic religions have (or have had) the views they have on masturbation, abortion, and patriarchy.

Gulliver’s Travels is a bunch of satirical metaphors that go right over the head of someone lacking the cultural context of the time it was written. The Lilliputians are at war with other tiny people because of how they eat their egg delicacies (I think they eat it out of a bowl while the others eat out of a cup or something). This is making fun of the schism between Catholics and Protestants taking communion where one believes the bread they eat becomes the literal body of Christ while it’s more figurative for the other. End of the day, they both eat bread to worship God and cleanse their souls, but they’ll kill each other (at the time anyway) for how the other does it.

Many have heard of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Some men are in a cave and shadows are cast representing real things, but only in an illusory way. They then leave the cave and discover the reality of those things. But what I didn’t know is who was casting the shadows. In ancient Greece around this time there was a group called the Sophists who basically told people what to think/know, ‘soph’ being the root term meaning “knowledge/to know.” Literally the knowers. These Sophists are the ones casting the shadows, claiming to give knowledge while only giving the illusion of it, trapping the men in a cave of falsehoods. What enables them to leave is what Plato calls philosophy, again ‘soph’ but also ‘philo’ meaning “love of/to love.” Essentially to escape the false illusions given by sophists and discover reality one can’t just claim to know things or be told things and take them at face value, they must have a love for knowledge that will lead them to seek it out and try to learn the best ways to seek it out.

At a certain point, you need to be force which pushes you forward. I saw a lot of intelligent people fail because they no longer had the external stimulus to go to class.

Also, it is easier to manipulate people in positions of power, but you have to understand how they think and are rewarded. There is a reason why a lot of liberal arts education is focused on having people understand others.

Also, the liberal arts education of a century ago was basically a degree which was intended to make managers. Along with it, the extra-curricular activities were an important part of the education, but just what happened in class.

That I spent years developing proficiency in my language and expanding my vocabulary to get accepted, only to be told to write simplified English in journalism school. Then they doubled down in my business classes to write for a 6th grade education and those who don't speak natively.

That if you're an international student at a small, struggling school, you can miss half your classes and bullshit your way through most assignments and they'll still give you a degree.

In other words: I learned nothing.

Bit too busy with the ole undiagnosed adhd and a hankering for world of Warcraft

There is no god. No amount of looking for it would be enough. I was already doubtful beforehand. Having grown up conservatively, I kind of already knew it was all fake, but the deprogramming took a while.

Higher education is a waste of money for the vast majority of degrees, even STEM ones.

Using physics (mechanic) you can become better at playing billiards and snooker.

We are all pretty much screwed

How low the expectations are for a putatively “adult” level of education

The Twin Paradox (special relativity). Every time I wrap my head around the idea I lose it a few weeks later an it's a mystery all over again.

If you were to put a big fan on a sailboat and point it at the sail, it would move the sailboat in a similar way as if the wind was pushing the sail.

That although there are many wonderful professors, the average professor does not know their ass from a hole in the ground.

Making a counter which scoud count up to 10 and loop back just with soma cables and electricity.

That all the shit I was told about making 60k out of college and doubling it in 4 years, how I would need college to get a cushy desk job, how without college I would never afford a house or a car, that my loans would be paid off in 10 years or forgiven in 20... All of that was a fucking lie.

Colleges will happily take 80 grand from teenagers and give them absolutely nothing for it.

That I had to study.

That when actually challenged I couldn't justify eating meat. It was just a part of a long conversation with another meat eating woman in completely unrelated majors.

Honestly that sort of thing is one of the most valuable parts of college imo. I was in a place dedicated to learning and thinking, surrounded by people also dedicated to it and it meant that I had a lot of deep intellectual conversations. Those years didn't just give me a career, they molded me into someone genuinely educated

That a diploma doesn't mean shit beside someone being able to say what their teacher want them to say... but that was not really new, it was just a lot more sad to experiment as naive me was hoping for something more.

High School is just busy work to keep you off the streets until you're ready for a job or college.