The difficult part of engineering is figuring out what number you have to round then multiply by 1.2 or 0.8
Comment on Virgin Physicists
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks agoNumbers 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”
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
deranger@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
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.
applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
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.
deranger@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
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.