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/

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.