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.

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