Too many words, not enough pictures

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cnidocyte
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28 Sep 2010, 6:59 pm

If a pictures worth a thousand words, why do the bastards writing half the chemistry books these days insist on using a thousand words to explain the concepts? Not just authors, college lecturers too. I've realized over the past year that I need to see everything concept. Even the most abstract concepts, I use mental images to conceptualize but translating the words of other people into my own mental images is really hard because I never know if I'm interpreting the words correctly so I search to find pictures to see if they match my mental images and I end up wasting loads of time doing this. My general chemistry book and organic chem book are full of pictures and I learn from them rapidly but when it comes to quantum mechanics its just words and equations that are meaningless to me unless I translate them into pictures. I supplement the pictures (which may be moving) with all the other 4 senses so they are can be extremely complex and full of information but without the mental image the words might as well be in Chinese because they mean nothing to me. For example heres some words from my physical chem book
Image
which I struggled with for about 20 minutes before searching for pictures and when I finally found a visual video on these concepts I saw that its an extremely simple concept that coulda been conveyed in a single picture. The equations are easy to convert into pictures when you know what they represent, its just these words that bother me. I'm getting sick of wasting my time with this verbal BS do any of you know any good visual resources for learning quantum mechanics and spectroscopy related subjects? Its ironic that this post consists of nothing but words but the only reason I use these dull, abstract monstrosities is because I have no alternative.



Apera
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Joined: 23 Feb 2008
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28 Sep 2010, 11:32 pm

I hate this about math books. The text takes up less space than the equivalent images, but the books are still massive. It boggles the mind.


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