gregjohn escreveu:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> The fact that all this notation and jargon is casually banded about
>> without the merest hint of an explanation suggests that it's the
>> standard "well-known" language for some subject area or other (as
>> opposed to something the authors came up with themselves).
> 
> 
> On math:
> 
> Junior-level college class on engineering physics.  The prof is talking about
> radar guns. He puts a formula on the board that explains the phase shift as a
> function of velocity.  I ask him three times why? What exactly is happening that
> the things are changing in this way?  His answer each time, "This is the
> formula."  The fact that he couldn't draw a cartoon of what was happening, IMO,
> means he didn't really understand it, even though he was smart enough allegedly
> to have had an elementary particle named after him.
> 
> At work 20 years ago, we were mixing tungsten and glass powder and sintering.
> The resulting composite structure looks just like povray's noise function.  We
> cross section and put a fine polish on these structures and take 30kV SEM images
> of it.  The glass is gone! -- it's like the noise function with empty pores!
> This confounded a roomful of PhD's in materials science until I figured out that
> at such a high, acceleration potential, the much lower atomic number material
> looks completely transparent/ invisible.  At lower kV's you can see the glass in
> the composite.  Anyway, one of my more snottier mentors still didn't believe
> that this could be the case: he said he would have liked to have a friend do
> some Monte Carlo simulations (math!) of electron paths to see if that were
> really possible.

mathematicians and chemists don't really go well together... :)

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