Ah whoops! It sounds like we're in a very similar boat indeed! All good, nice to meet a like-minded soul on HN.
I completely know what you mean about the complex numbers and Hamiltonians etc. A lot of the time I think I could even have a reasonable chance of understanding the concepts given a few graphs/diagrams and some kind of translation to prose/pseudocode (or even just code) but there is so much symbolic syntax in both maths and physics (too much for me!) - I think it's probably hard to become fluent unless you use it every day I reckon.
I can also imagine something like a 'reasonably realistic' subatomic particle simulation framework in a 3D engine where one could fully control time space, energies, polarisation, quantum stuff etc and really examine the events in detail. I think one could perhaps start to get a feel for how it all fits together just by playing with the various interactions and watching/virtually-measuring carefully?
I completely know what you mean about the complex numbers and Hamiltonians etc. A lot of the time I think I could even have a reasonable chance of understanding the concepts given a few graphs/diagrams and some kind of translation to prose/pseudocode (or even just code) but there is so much symbolic syntax in both maths and physics (too much for me!) - I think it's probably hard to become fluent unless you use it every day I reckon.
I can also imagine something like a 'reasonably realistic' subatomic particle simulation framework in a 3D engine where one could fully control time space, energies, polarisation, quantum stuff etc and really examine the events in detail. I think one could perhaps start to get a feel for how it all fits together just by playing with the various interactions and watching/virtually-measuring carefully?