Alexey Petrov, quoted in the article, subbed in to teach one day in my quantum mechanics class :) It was the first day we were being introduced to the theory of scattering, and I will never forget his intro. He asked the class, “what is scattering?”, waited a moment, and then threw a whiteboard marker against the wall, and answered his own question: “that’s scattering”. Lots of times, physics classes can be so heavy…
Bear with me.
Roughly 2000 years ago, the number of people who could do arithmetic and writing was Now it is 95% of the world population, and 99.9% of 'Western' world.
Lets say that Alexey Petrov is about as highly educated and trained as any human so far. (A Physics PhD represents pretty much 25 years of full-time full-on education). But most of us stop earlier, say 20 years, and many have less full-on education, perhaps not doing an hour a day of revision or whatever.
But imagine we could build the computing resources, the smaller class sizes, the gamification, whatever, that meant that each child was pushed as far as they could get (maybe some kind of Mastery learning approach ) - not as far as they can get if the teacher is dealing with 30 other unruly kids, but actually as far as their brain will take them.
Will Alexey be that much far ahead when we do this? Is Alexey as far ahead as any human can be? Or can we go further - how much further? And if every kid leaving university is as well trained as an Astronaut, is capable of calculus and vector multiplication, will that make a difference in the world today?