If only engineering documentation was as precise and comprehensive as this meme claims…
STEM
Submitted 7 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/93c2a59c-c772-4003-a6a3-460b8368a96a.jpeg
Comments
nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br 7 months ago
OpenStars@startrek.website 7 months ago
Yeah it’s a managerial function involving skill and time and therefore money, but if it doesn’t directly translate into profits for the corporation, then who has interest in that kind of investment these days?
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Oh but don’t worry, there’s plenty of money to do it twice!
WastedJobe@feddit.de 7 months ago
My engineering friends and me propose that physicists should be referred to as theoretical engineers.
KevonLooney@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I propose engineers not be allowed to name things. Not everything needs to be an “engineer”
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 7 months ago
We aren’t the ones who did that. You need to have taken statics and thermo otherwise you’re just a sparkling tradesperson
Steve@startrek.website 7 months ago
Most mad scientists are actually mad engineers.
NielsBohron@lemmy.world 7 months ago
As someone with an engineering degree and a science degree, scientists are absolutely nothing like engineers.
Gork@lemm.ee 7 months ago
They’ve got some things in common.
Technical aptitude. Complete unawareness, or purposeful neglect, of social norms. Science related dad jokes.
PrimeMinisterKeyes@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Doing research, I used to work with mathematicians, engineers AND physicists on a daily basis for years. Physicists were the least fun. Most of them seemed to think of themselves as a sort of Jesuits of Science. As in: “I just figured this out, and already it’s set in stone, why do you even argue with me?” Mathematicians and engineers were a lot humbler, more down-to-earth. Also, some of them were astonishingly edgy in a very positive way, and I like that.
Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I’ve heard applied mathematics used for us physicists but that one’s new, nice
oce@jlai.lu 7 months ago
There are different kinds of physics researchers and it doesn’t look like what physics lessons show in university, which is mostly theory. Most are not theoricians, they work on experiments and analyze results, they design and build instruments similarly to engineers. It seems the main difference is the kind of question they want to answer to: scientific question vs client need.
mypasswordistaco@iusearchlinux.fyi 7 months ago
What of experimental physicists?
marcos@lemmy.world 7 months ago
“Theory engineers” would be precise and correct.
mypasswordistaco@iusearchlinux.fyi 7 months ago
Not at all. People (engineers?) seem to forget that experimental physicists exist
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Tbf advancement in math usually means “random shit we’re doing for the fun of it” and then 40 years later an actual application is discovered
It took centuries for people to realize number theory could be used for encryption
UnrepententProcrastinator@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Someone just Veritasiumed.
mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Dereked
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Wait are we supposed to be making super precise blueprints? They never build what I draw so I just give rough dimensions on a sketch and specify the important bits
intensely_human@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I mean there’s not that much precision needed to pick out the toppings on a cheeseburger. You don’t need to specify the mass of the pickles man we do this all day.
Figureinplastic@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I was gonna say…
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Pure mathematician here - some of us argue “mathematics is a language”, others of us argue “language gets in the way of mathematics”.
The latter feels much more true; as a species we’re absolutely awful when it comes to talking about abstract things. The thing is, those abstract things are often VERY interesting.
It’s like making a map and being fascinated with the type of trees rather than the shape of the land, because the types of trees tell us about the climate, soil, and even history of the land.
baseless_discourse@mander.xyz 7 months ago
I would say a important part of my job is to find the appropriate mathematical language to model computer programs, I would say using efficient language not only helps us discover more structures and connections between different kinds of program, but also leads to efficient and simplistic real-world implementations.
I would argue picking the right mathematical language is absolutely essential whether you are interested in theory or practicality.
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 7 months ago
See now, I’d argue that the language comes after the mathematics. For example, I walk to work each day; part of walking to work is trying to find the route that lets me lie in the longest.
Now, humans are pretty good at exploring and finding alternative routes between locations, and they also tend to locate the shortest route given enough time.
Trying to explain how this intuitive activity works necessitates the use of graph theory. The graph theory was something our brain had constructed in the background, but it wasn’t entirely conscious. Trying to explain this in natural language would take pages, however…
Given a set V of street intersections, and a set E of streets connecting two intersections, and a set W of weights assigned to each E. I can calculate the shortest route by applying one of the pathfinding algorithms (which are expressed in this notation).
This explanation will cover any pathfinding problem, but it’s not great at conveying what is a really happening. The language we must use gets in the way of conveying the mathematics that is going on.
We do need a language (telepathy not being on the menu), but that language is a separate entity from the mathematics itself.
There are “mathematical languages”, but these are present to describe mathematics. There are mathematical theories of language, but again the language itself is not mathematics - its structure, however, has mathematical properties.
I suppose you could say “fire has the property of being hot, but it isn’t hotness itself”? Language is used to communicate mathematics, but it is not mathematics itself.
Now, this is not to discount notational developments in easing communication - that’s a great branch as you have to check your new language and its rules match the mathematics it tries to describe. However, again, it’s important not to conflate the thing you are describing with the thing you are using to describe it!
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 7 months ago
I say mathematics is what you write down to remember logic, and it has an awkward syntax.
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 7 months ago
So, let’s say you write down the words “fire is a chain reaction between carbon and oxygen that produces heat”. You’ve characterised fire yes, but is that sentence itself the fire?
Let’s say you write down the equation describing this reaction so you can play with it and manipulate it. Is this fire, or just a convenient way to talk about it?
I’d argue neither of these are fire, and both will never completely describe a fire (though they come damn close).
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 7 months ago
“language gets in the way of mathematics”.
Look how often one branch of mathematics is found to aid solving a problem in a previously unconnected area.
This demonstrates our mathematical history and choice of language is suboptimal.
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 7 months ago
You know, I’d never considered that, but yes that does indeed seem to be the case!
jj122@lemmings.world 7 months ago
Oh man the university ptsd as an engineer. I once asked a physics prof at what width does the split slot experiment break down, she couldn’t understand the question. All the other engineering students were nodding their heads in agreement with the question and tried to explain the question in a different way, still no idea what we were asking.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
It’s a good question, but asking it shows that the experiment was explained poorly.
The slits aren’t the reason you see an interference pattern. The slits function as two lenses, which, combined with the waves cause an interference pattern to appear on the wall.
All you need is some light in the same frequency, and something to bend it. That can be two slits, some glass, or an entire galaxy.
Of course, there are lots of conditions where you don’t get this pattern, but that’s more to do with the bars becoming too blurry to see clearly.
ChrisLicht@lemm.ee 7 months ago
What a great comment!
1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
That’s when considering the slits as a lens though, which they will act as at any diameter however there’s going to be a width at which the angle of approach and wavelength of the light are insignificant enough that you practically can’t tell that the slits were even there right?
marcos@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The interference patter gets closer and closer to a set of independent peaks when you spread the slits away. There is no single point it breaks down, and the wave behavior predicts exactly the “particle behavior” you get when the slits are too far away.
krellor@fedia.io 7 months ago
Topology: no, a set being open doesn't imply that it is closed. What if it's both? We call it clopen. Moving on.
MxM111@kbin.social 7 months ago
Interesting. That’s not how I was taught (different time, different language). A set that has some boundary points not being part of a set is open. Otherwise it is closed. It was binary definition. A 1D-sphere (a circle) was classified as a closed set. No boundary. But I looked in google and now it is different.
Ckjazz@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
As one in engineering, I think our work is less about precision and more about solving (challenging) problems with what is needed and nothing more.
Anybody can build a deck that stands up, an engineer can build one that’s just strong enough to stand up (for rated load haha)
lightnegative@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yeah, it’s about applying physics to real world problems to come up with real world solutions.
Often in a more practical form because unlike in Physics, you can’t start off with “assume zero gravity and a spherical cow shape”
autokludge@programming.dev 7 months ago
As a design/drafter – I design to ‘look right’ which is probably overkill. Hopefully that headroom helps with the 300lb ape factor.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 7 months ago
Anybody can build a deck that stands up
Uhuh.
Ckjazz@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
It doesn’t need to be true, just convey a point :p
ShimmeringKoi@hexbear.net 7 months ago
Biology: I found this cool bug, it doesn’t act like the other bugs who look like this
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
I like how a lot of mathematicians won’t post their code because the pythonistas would destroy them.
Xanthrax@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Supersets and subsets are pretty simple, and I wish more people would use them when contextualizing human knowledge.
kurwa@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I tried explaining something once using sets and supersets, and they didn’t grasp it at all.
lightnegative@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Probably your explanation needed more morphisms and a monad
Xanthrax@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I agree; that’s why I’m disappointed.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
I’m a phd chemist who does safety work for (mostly) engineers. I get a lot of “but you can do quantum physics, this should be easy”.
I always reply that it’s just basic maths, anyone who graduated highschool can “do” quantum physics. But I’m convinced all the people who say they can visualize whats going on are just liars. But then, that’s also how I feel about FEM, so what do I know.
mypasswordistaco@iusearchlinux.fyi 7 months ago
I don’t know what fucking high school you went to, but we sure as shit didn’t cover stuff like partial differential equations and functional analysis.
Chrobin@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
Well, when you get to Lie groups, it gets a lot harder. But generally I agree, nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is mathematically not that hard.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Single particle, one dimension, nonrelativistic QM, exactly. Making it N-particle breaks my brain and will to live.
MxM111@kbin.social 7 months ago
As long as integrals, group theory and Hilbert spaces are concerned “basic math”, sure, they can do QM.
Chrobin@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
I think you just have to differentiate whether you want to do mathematically rigorous QM (which gets arbitrarily hard), or just do useful calculations.
blargerer@kbin.social 7 months ago
People in every field tend to massively over estimate how easy it would be for other people.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Technically, photon momentum is quantum physics, and that’s p = h*f/c = h/lambda
fadhl3y@lemmy.one 7 months ago
“they have played us for fools”
Naal@hexbear.net 7 months ago
chad microprocessor vs soy abelian group
uis@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Why soy?
happybadger@hexbear.net 7 months ago
I’ve taken multiple advanced trigonometry courses and still can’t really say what trigonometry is. Mathematics is just the fake thing that made puzzle kids feel smart before chess was invented. Oh wow you can make little symbols and they’re a special language only you can speak showing how clever you are. Neat they make a circle I thought I could draw one of those but I need a fucking PhD apparently.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 7 months ago
So you’re telling me this subset is some kind of Santa’s boot in green?
shalva97@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The guy on the bottom reminds me of The Math Sorcerer
wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Mathematician: this is category theory. No, it didn’t have anything to do with categorization, it just helps us understand how spaces can map to each other. Yeah I guess it’s kinda like graph theory or algebra, but not really. We made a category of graphs, and you can use the category of graphs to represent endofunctors on the category of categories.
marcos@lemmy.world 7 months ago
– It’s about nothing.
– No sets?
– No, forget the sets.
– You’ve got to have sets.
– Who says you’ve got to have sets? Remember when we were talking about functions of functions? That could be a theory all by itself.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 7 months ago
So they are metagaming mathematics?
Gork@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Ok but can I use a graphing calculator to graph those graphs?
wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Also no! The “graphing calculator” is an abomination that should be more rightly called a plotting calculator. But that’s what happens when you let engineers in Texas name something.
Notyou@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
It’s a strange feeling to think you understand what you are reading until you get to the end, but you have given me that feeling. I was like “yeah category that’s a word I know. Let’s math the hell out of some categories.” Then I recognized other words you said, but by the time I was at the end of your post I wasn’t sure if I understood anything.
I don’t mind feeling dumb. Honestly it helps keep my narcissism in check. I like math because I don’t understand all of it even though it should be logical.
wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
If it helps, category theory is affectionately referred to by mathematicians as “generalized abstract nonsense”.
It can be very confusing, but it’s sort of a field of math that helps to relate ideas on one area to similar ones in another domain.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 7 months ago
I’ve read a fair few unintuitive mathematical things, but category theory has so far been the worst. Some things are just plain unintuitive and don’t catch your attention. Then there are things that are intuitive and really do reel you in. Finally there are things that seem intuitive but become so complex that your comprehension inverses: what you thought you knew feels wrong because of the new things you learned.
The latter has been my experience with category theory.
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holomorphic@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It may have nothing to do with categorization, but has everything to do with categorification which is much more interresting anyway.