I doubt that. One can buy the "physics package", the glassware, with defined and measurable behavior. Even the people who design the physics part don't need to understand the QM of how it works. Some scientist has already done that and published.
Lots of good engineering was done in Roman times and the middle ages and Victorian times, by people who didn't understand the science. Lots of engineering is still being done by people like that. I never understood the quantum mechanics of how a tunnel diode works, but that never slowed me down designing TD circuits. I suspect that few EEs understand the quantum mechanics of transistors or thermocouples.
As I was saying to my youngest engineer yesterday, "We're engineers. We don't have to understand it, we only have to make it work."
Confusion is a valuable part of the early stages of a design, and I encourage it.
The IPCC approved models don't work.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
On Wed, 13 Jan 2016 08:39:31 -0800, John Larkin Gave us:
I think Pythagoras said that. He was deep into it, yet after he got done an entire world full of folks used his stuff, and many if not most never really had a fool grasp of it all.. Or that is all they did have.
Scientists, bless their hearts, spend careers understanding hard stuff, and, if they are lucky, contribute something. I can stuff a PC board with the fruits of thousands of scientist-years of work, but I sure don't have time to understand it all. How does the epoxy in FR4 bond? I don't need to know.
And at some level, component behavior is only approximated by the theory, and has to be measured to be useful in real life. I can do that.
Sometimes it's fun, and useful, to have a tourist-level appreciation for the science. I was doing that yesterday, to try to figure how big the pulses would be from a single-photon superconducting nanowire detector.
Why do scientific papers make such efforts to hide real voltages and currents? The best paper that I can find has scope shots whose vertical axis has, with some effort, been converted from millivolts to "au."
AU is not an SI unit!
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
I wouldn't doubt that somebody there probably understands, but probably not the guy doing the circuit designs, I shouldn't think, unless it's a very small shop like mine.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
I had two semisters of chemistry and two semisters of physics and two of thermo in college. We pretty much stuck to classic stuff. Relativity and QM were barely mentioned. The chem and phys courses were basically "science for engineers" stuff.
AoE is the reverse, basically an introduction to electronics for physics students. It doesn't talk much about GR or QM.
We care a lot about the speed of light and electromagnetics, but not much about relativity or QM. OK, we know that photons have energy inverse on wavelength, basic stuff like that.
Exactly.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
ow approximately where the resonance is, and what conditions you need to ma ke it show up and be stable. You don't need to know any QM, any more than y ou do to use a transistor. There are a lot of smart engineers here, who use a lot of transistors, but I suspect that few could give a detailed account of, say, Bloch waves or spin-orbit coupling without opening a book or regu rgitating Wikipedia. Same with Rb reference designers.
Figuring out the "physics" of how something works is the fun part for me.
AU, arbitrary units. It's basically a place holder to stick on the graph when you are not sure of some calibration or other gain factor. I guess as a physics grad student you get "spanked" a few times for putting the wro ng units on a graph. You are then gun shy, and stick AU there so no one will call you on it. It's somehow better to be ambiguous rather than potentiall y wrong.
Oh for sure, one place I interviewed was Frequency Electronics. 100's of employee's and two physicists. (I think I might have taken the job if it hadn't been on Long Island.) I was only there for a day, but my impression was that one of the physicists was mostly in charge of the gas blowing and Rb filling operation.
Coastal cities are ports. You unload containers from ships there, and put t hem on railway lines.
Railways don't work well underwater, so if seal level rises, you've got to build a new bunch of wharves and jetties, with cranes to lift the container s, and houses to accommodate all the skilled workers who drive those cranes .
It can be done fairly fast, but if you've got to relocate all your coastal cities at once because the coast has moved, it gets to be a big and expensi ve job, and you transport system won't be working right until you've finish ed it (which complicate the process of rebuilding all the coastal cities a t once).
I thought that you would amuse us, and I wasn't wrong.
But I understand what it means, while you are silly enough to demand that science delivers something that it isn't designed to do, and too silly to realise that you are making an unreasonable - and in fact irrational - demand.
We've noticed. You can generate a great deal of confusion, and are remarkab ly enthusiastic about staying confused. It may be useful early in the brain
-storming process, but part of the brain-storming process is clearing up th e initial confusions.
That's not a confused claim - it's just wrong, and at several levels.
The first is the the IPCC doesn't "approve " models. It exists to review th e peer-reviewed literature, and to put together a report on what the scienc e is telling us now in a form that policy-makers can understand.
It's the peer-reviewed literature that approves the models - in the first i nstance by letting them through peer-review to get published, and subsequen tly by citing them - critically or favourably - in subsequent papers.
Secondly, the climate models that the IPCC cited in it's most recent report in 2014
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on page 18 show quite tight confidence limits for atmospheric CO2 levels ar ound 450 and 500 ppm and don't balloon out to a half degree worst case rang e until the CO2 level gets up to about 700ppm.
The models are clearly working well enough to do the job that's required.
Globally, they need to work well enough to frighten everybody into dumping the burning of fossil carbon as fuel as fast as possible, and while that do es seem to be under way, in an ideal world they would be working well enoug h to convince even people like you, who get all their information on the su bject from denialist web-sites.
If this claim was going to be remotely convincing, John Larkin would have learned to spell "semester" in the process.
Nothing that he's posted here has suggested that he was awake during any of these lectures
Some engineers know enough physics and chemistry to appreciate how little they know. John Larkin doesn't, which makes him a gullible sucker for every denialist web-site that the Murdoch media serve up to him.
No I don't. Before I'm going to accept a proposition to pay trillions of additional tax from a group of people, who happen to have a group of scientists working 'for them' to give them ammunition in the form of (edited) reports, and who happen to gain tremendously from such proposal, I will demand rigid proof of what their apocalyptic claims in case I won't pay up.
People like you are very useful for them. You 'talk away' the uncertainties in the models for them and some people might fall for that, not me, although I'm sure the people you are helping out here appreciate your work very much.
I don't trust that system, I don't trust its models and I don't believe you. Whatever denigrating and arrogant dismissive expletives you might ever utter, I'm not believing you, except for your contribution on non-progressive windings and maybe some more non-AGW related stuff.
know approximately where the resonance is, and what conditions you need to make it show up and be stable. You don't need to know any QM, any more tha n you do to use a transistor. There are a lot of smart engineers here, who use a lot of transistors, but I suspect that few could give a detailed acco unt of, say, Bloch waves or spin-orbit coupling without opening a book or r egurgitating Wikipedia. Same with Rb reference designers.
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No that's not true, some numbers are very well defined*. But if you don't know it's better/safer to be vague. You've perhaps never seen what I call "the feeding frenzy" at a physics seminar/ colloquium. There's some sign the speaker doesn't quite understand some point, and the audience attacks, it can be ugly.
George H.
*at least for me, data sheets are attached to every instrument, all needed gains recorded... with 'scope shots. Grad students may not be as diligent at recording. I like to read old physics papers, much better craftsmanship.
Accepting the reality of anthropogenic global warming doesn't involve payin g trillions in taxes - for a start you personally probably couldn't pay eve n thousands in tax.
What is does involve is progressively replacing the current electricity gen erating infrastructure with windmills and solar generating equipment.
At the moment that involves a slightly higher investment per kilowatt of ge nerating capacity than would building more fossil carbon fueled plant, but since the process would increase the renewable energy manufacturing structu re by a factor of ten, reducing the unit cost per generating station by hal f, it would be a profitable investment, and save us the money we are curren tly spending on digging up fossil carbon as well.
Since there's only a finite amount of fossil carbon to be dug up, we'd have to do it eventually, anyway.
We've also got to dump almost all our gasoline-powered cars and trucks and replace them with electric vehicles, and build enough extra generating plan t to keep them charged as well.
It's a big job, and involves a fairly spectacular financial investment. The right way to motivate is to put a tax - maybe $60 a ton - on fossil carbon fuel - and spend the takings on building the renewable energy structure.
People will make money out of building all the equipment - probably not the same people who currently make money out of digging up fossil carbon and s elling it as fuel, which leads them to spending money on the denialist prop aganda which seems to be what is forming your opinion.
I don't "talk away" the uncertainties in the climate models. I do know more about climate models than you do - you are spectacularly ignorant on the s ubject.
The point is that climate models don't have to spectacularly accurate to ex plain what anthropogenic global warming is doing at the moment, nor what it will do as we pump more fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
You demand some kind of mathematical proof of their accuracy, which isn't o n offer, as an excuse to ignore the problem until you can get this impossib le proof, which is the kind of tax-avoiding ploy that James Arthur is also adopting.
That's your privilege. The reasons you won't trust the system are completel y irrational, and you look like a total idiot when you put them forward. St upidity is a capital crime when it leads you to take stupid risks and get y ourself killed. When it leads you to opposed a necessarily society-wide pro gram of investment and development, it's merely anti-social.
You don't have to believe me. We know you are stupid and gullible - you tel l us so often enough - and while I'm mildly gratified that you recognise my contributions on "non-progressive windings" as useful, I'd be happier to s ee them acknowledged by a slightly more discerning audience.
to know approximately where the resonance is, and what conditions you need to make it show up and be stable. You don't need to know any QM, any more than you do to use a transistor. There are a lot of smart engineers here, w ho use a lot of transistors, but I suspect that few could give a detailed a ccount of, say, Bloch waves or spin-orbit coupling without opening a book o r regurgitating Wikipedia. Same with Rb reference designers.
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It's part of the culture that keeps them honest. All scientist react to wea k arguments and defective logic like hungry piranha. If you think it's bad in public meeting you should see a few reviewer's comments sometime.
Of course reviewers aren't operating in public, so there's often quite a lo t of weak argument and defective logic in the review.
I had a fight with one of the reviewers of my first serious paper, where I commented that he didn't know enough about the subject to realise how littl e he knew. It got published. The third reviewer conceded that I was right.
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