I never really thought they needed extra defining.. but I guess you learn something new everyday. I think people get lost in QM because they rush into the complex ideas of it without understanding the basics. The basics behind QM are simple.. it is taking a look at the universe on the smallest scale possible. Before QM was dealing with subatomic particles, it was dealing with atoms.. and at the time, atoms were the smallest that we knew of and that was our QM. As we learned that atoms are made of subatomic particles, QM moved to them. Now we are learning that subatomic particles are essentially condensed fields of energy and that is where QM is moving to now. If we were to find out those fields can be broken down even more, QM will move there. Another good analogy would be accounting.. if you had an accountant and they did all their accounting in terms of only pennies, that would be quantum accounting. And I wouldn't say not following the big bang is retarded.. unless someone invents a time machine and can witness it, I think the big bang is science's attempt to combat creationism. Fight one creation point with another.. and I personally don't follow the big bang, I have my own theory.. but I also acknowledge the fact that it is currently the leading scientific theory. It doesn't really state that something came from nothing though cause we've known for awhile now that energy cannot he created nor destroyed.. so the big bang couldn't have created the universe from nothing.. and the nothing they talk about isn't actually nothing. It is just nothing we can observe yet. Like if you and I were talking face to face, there would appear to be nothing between us.. but in reality there is something. Black holes though.. that would be retarded to say they can't exist cause it is the same as saying that there can't exist a spot in the universe where gravity is so strong that light cannot escape it. I don't really buy into the singularity part, least not it being infinitely dense.. cause to me, if that were the case then we probably wouldn't see black holes of different sizes or that they can grow. It's just so dense, that it'll appear to be infinitely dense and would be ages before we have the math to determine how dense it actually is.
Most of it. I write a lot about what I read. I try and put it in my own words, and it really helps me remember it. Kinda like taking notes in school, then rewriting them over and over again.