Comment on Virgin Physicists
deranger@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Numbers like that are why I quit majoring in mechanical engineering. Physics took the beauty of math and made it ugly.
You knew something was wrong in calculus when you got a fucked up coefficient that wasn’t a nice number.
After calculus though, they just expect you to cope with fucked up coefficients. In Diff Eq, sometimes you do just get something like 3/111 cos (6/111 x). It gets harder to come up with examples that work out with nice integers.
Physics can also have some really beautiful math, look at Lissajous figures. Once you understand the connections between e, the imaginary plane, and sine/cosine, you get some profound understandings about how things electric and magnetic fields work.
Numbers like that should have been why you kept going in mech E.
Once you get past the educational stage, every one of those calculations becomes “OK now round to the closest whole number that gives you the larger factor of safety and move on”
The difficult part of engineering is figuring out what number you have to round then multiply by 1.2 or 0.8
Eh, it’s just fundamentally ugly to me and that really turned me off. Rounding doesn’t help, that’s like turning the lights off for sex. Engineering is still very cool to me, and I have huge respect for those who do it, but I’d never have made it. It’s physics but even further perverted by reality. Math was beautiful to me because of how “pure” it was. Just straight logic, divorced from the messy world we live in. Tidy coefficients and elegant derivations.
I have to hard disagree with you there. The beauty of the math equations they test you with in school is completely artificially selected. The vast majority of math does not have nice neat solutions. There is a lot of it that doesn’t have any solution at all. The beauty of engineering is figuring out how much of things you actually need. You might calculate that some quantity should be an irrational number for some design optimum, but the amount of precision you actually need will be some range around that. When you do that and see your design in the real world actually functioning, that’s the greatest feeling in the world by far.
Not knocking people’s choices, it just wasn’t for me. If math in reality isn’t math in education, it’s even better that I left.
I’ll still contend math is much more elegant than physics or engineering, though. There’s no e^I*pi + 1 = 0 equivalent for either.
I actually really like physics, and it’s 100% because I’m fucked up and evil
the philosopher floating on a cloud: So how do you guys really know what’s real?
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
The trick is to round everything. Pi? Basically 3.
GoatTnder@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’ve heard a story (so like 4th hand at this point) where an astrophysicist was talking about galaxy rotations or something. “And for this model, we can simplify pi to 10.”
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
My thermodynamics professor made so approximations in his derivations that all of his equations had an “O” term to represent the inaccuracy. Every time he made another approximation he’d say “and, of course, the O sucks up the error”.