Riddle me this all you "Men of Science"

Rarer still, that an invention is produced without knowledge and understanding (science :== knowledge and understanding).

Does that mean that 'the science' in an invention is not usually original with the inventor? Or, that the 'original science' label is often inappropriately applied?

Alessandro Volta studied the electrochemical cell "battery" a couple of centuries ago. Material science is still exploring that concept, but all battery inventions in the modern day do somewhat relate to Volta's work. All those inventions are produced from Volta's original science.

Your above sentences are possibly wrong, but certainly vague. Are you a politician?

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It is labelled sci.electronics.design. Nothing seems to get designed here. Some designs are discussed, but I can't recall a case where anybody adopted a modification to a design posted here.

It isn't magic. Science is about understanding what's going on, and having that understanding can be helpful when you are designing a circuit to do a particular job. Most of the science involved has been around for a long ti me. You can use scientific techniques to analyses circuits though it's mos tly using a hammer to crack a nut.

Seems to be.

And mostly in less than a fortnight. It's not ambitious stuff.

jects, and I troubleshoot for them a lot. We brainstorm and design review a lot.

The interesting bit of that was invented by Phil Hobbs.

There's nothing mysterious about the human subconscious. Think about someth ing consciously for a bit and the subconscious gets activated and works on it in the background. The sleeping brain does seem to keep on working at it overnight.

you in school, or let a computer do it for you.

Not if you understand what's going on. Programming a computer to do calcul ations in way the suits your problem isn't any kind of rote process.

If you don't know what you are doing, it might look that way.

What "too many people" can do is always cheap. It can still be useful and v aluable.

y matters. It makes it easier to grade tests.

Working out which equations you need to solve to get a solution to your par ticular problem is a bit more demanding. Academic training does aim to give you tools to do this.

Students who concentrate on the particular tools they can recognise as usef ul don't learn as much as they might, and aren't aware what they may have m issed.

John's stories about his time at Tulane make it fairly clear that he missed quite a lot.

The Nazi scientists who wrote off relativity as "Jewish science" weren't being reasonable.

The scepticism was decidedly immoderate.

But sometimes you don't have any choice. Rejecting more complicated approaches as "too hard" isn't a good idea, any more than rejecting the idea of designing you own special purpose transformers and going to the trouble of getting them wound.

Magic doesn't work. Engineering eventually works (most of the time). Scien ce can let you evaluate possible engineering solutions in the design phase, when they can fall over before you have spent too much money, and do it wi thout killing anybody. It also lets you think about bizarre and unconventio nal solutions, if you are creative enough to come up with them.

If you can get a new solution patented, it probably is novel and creative. It's rarely worth the trouble. Publishing something new in a peer-reviewed journal is a less stringent test - Review of Scientific Instruments has pub lished a number of re-inventions of the wheel. John Larkin doesn't seem to know much about any of that.

early.

then go back and see how they fit the requirements and maybe modify the pro blem statement as necessary in light of your new understanding. If the solu tions seem to have applications in other areas, then file them for investig ation later.

esize solutions then go back to the problem.

The design creates new things in the reality that science lets you analyse. It's the same reality. Nothing in your design is going to give it access t o a different reality, with different physical laws.

ing absolute statements as if you know every engineer and manager on the pl anet - you've only been exposed to a very small subset. That may be true in your experience but your's is not necessarily the same as others.

Not when looked at in detail. Cat's whiskers ? or vibrissae - are white.

Engineers and manager may dislike uncertainty, but if they disliked it too much they would never develop anything new or change what they had to make it work better. If they were excessively tolerant of uncertainty they'd nev er get anything finished. What you've done is latched onto a necessary feat ure of the breed, and ignored the fact that there's an optimum level of tol erance of uncertainty for any given project.

The worst disaster I was involved in involved a manager who was excessively tolerant about whether a design would work, and totally intolerant of any delay on the process of getting the design turned into hardware that might work. So we shipped "completed" designs off to be turned into printed circu it layouts without doing a design review to make sure that the circuit - as designed - would do what was required. The circuits all took a lot of debu gging.

The last bug that we found and fixed - several years later - was a trivial design error that probably would have been found by a design review. When t he software guys got to the point of knowing what was going wrong in the ca lculation, it only took me a few minutes to realise what the board wasn't d oing, and not much longer to modify the board to do the right thing for sma ll right shifts.

We had to move to a new layout to deal with longer left shifts, but it didn 't take much work. By that time I had enough confidence in the software guy s to let them deal with the situations where we might have wanted to use th e very long right shifts that I'd originally allowed for, which saved a bit of hardware.

You can't do engineering until you understand what you are doing. Science i s all about getting that understanding systematised and published so that o ther people can exploit it.

We had cathedrals, animal breeding and water mill long before we had develo ped the scientific method.

Though frequently nobody had any idea that they were there.

And once science lets us understand what's going on the inventions happen a lot more frequently.

is even original.

Science isn't supposed to be original. It's mostly fitting new observations into a coherent pre-existing structure. Sometimes people have to invent s tuff - like the periodic table - to provide the structure - and then explor e something completely different - like radioactivity - to work out why the structure looks the way it does.

Working out what electronic instruments to design ought to be a big chunk o f that. Finding customers who need a new instrument designed isn't trivial

- it's not something that I've ever been able to manage

It seems likely that the ideas you explore originally come from your custom ers - as fairly poorly articulated ambitions. You don't talk about that par t of the process at all, which makes sense - it does seem to be the crucial part of your business model

o.

h customers.

But you find potential customers to swap ideas with. I imagine that I could design the electronics that you design, but I haven't a clue how to find t he people who woud want it designed, or would pay for it after I'd had it m ade.

This does suggest that your sales routine involves quite a lot of flim-flam . You do seem to have to concentrate on customers who know enough to be sur e that they can't buy an off-the shelf solution - people who are looking fo r an off-the-shelf solution would look for a source than manufactured in hi gher volume, which is to say more cheaply, and could point to a bigger cus tomer base.

Offering to design something new for them wouldn't usually go down well.

Disagree. Most of the inventions that shaped our civilization were created by amateurs, not scientists. The scientists chased the inventions to explain them, and in the process discovered new science.

The romans built giant structures before statics or dynamics were imagined.

The steam engine came before thermodynamics.

The vacuum tube was invented by a guy who never understood it. No science involved.

Even the bipolar transistor was an accidental discovery.

Volta's battery happened a long time before there was any electrochemistry, or even any understanding of electricity.

Inventions classicly preceded and inspired science. Sometimes it took science hundreds or thousands of years to catch up. Or hundreds of thousands.

" He was among the two or perhaps three University students who attended Ma xwell's last course. Maxwell's lectures, he admitted, were difficult to fol low. Maxwell, he said, often appeared obscure and had "a paradoxical and al lusive way of speaking". On occasions Fleming was the only student at those lectures."

Fleming does seem to have understood exactly what he was doing, and had bee n exposed quite enough science to make that possible.

But it was discovered in the course of a scientific investigation at Bell L abs "The bipolar point-contact transistor was invented in December 1947 at the Bell Telephone Laboratories by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain under t he direction of William Shockley."

They clearly knew what they were looking for, and ended up get a Nobel Priz e in Physics for the work. The particular observation that got them on the right track might have been "accidental" in the sense that they didn't know that it was going to work, bu they clearly knew what they were looking for , and were looking carefully in all the right places.

y, or even any understanding of electricity.

cience hundreds or thousands of years to catch up. Or hundreds of thousands .

The word scientist wasn't coined until 1834. You can clearly invent stuff w ithout science. Classical civilisations - Greece and Rome got by without th e concept.

Once we'd got the idea it does seem to have made it easier to invent stuff, not that John Larkin seems to know enough about science or invention to re alise this.

That's not disagreement. Amateurs (who love their subject) are good observers, i.e. good scientists. They may also be fathers, mothers, or hunters of wild mushrooms, those roles are not exclusive.

False. The formulae you would use for static or dynamic loading are modern, but they had perfectly good imaginations; before literacy was widespread, they passed on knowledge (even if it was only rules-of-thumb) that we do not now have direct access to.

Much of thermodynamics is more modern that an application (the piston steam engine). So what?

You mean he didn't have a theory before making an observation? That's how experimental science WORKS. He did understand vacuum as an unknown medium for electric research. He was doing science.

A discovery by professional scientists, working to gain understanding, is not 'accident', rather 'successful exploration'.

He understood dissimilar metals. That was new science. He observed and reported...

Huh? Science may seem monotonically increasing this last century or two, but we haven't had even a language that spanned 'thousands of years'.

Einstein might have even been wrong. There are more modern formulations of general relativity that say that the relative sizes of objects in the universe is variable, the speed of light is not constant, and time is the universal invariant.

As they both say the same things up to our ability to test at the moment, no one is sure which one is correct, but there are theoretical advantages to theories where the speed of light isn't the invariant.

See e.g.

Greeks and Romans did science. The more modern scientific methods were not developed, and they got a lot wrong (a lot more than modern scientists) but they did study things to try to find general rules about how stuff works. Then they looked at how the information could be applied - the engineering bit.

The etymological roots for the word "scientist", however, go back thousands of years to the Proto Indoeuropean word for "separate". Another path from the same root gives "shit". (That should give the anti-science bunch in this group a fun time.)

Modern science has techniques - like peer-reviewed publication - that make it rather more effective than it's classical precursors.

Engineering did exploit mathematics from time to time, but natural philosop hy didn't come into it all that often, if at all.

Natural philosophy is where science came from, but modern science has a bui lt-in a review process that makes it's published conclusions somewhat more reliable than Aristotle's commentaries. Of course Aristotle got some stuff right - what he wrote about the hectocotyl (reproductive) arm of the octop us was entirely correct, even if nobody believed it for the next two thousa nd years - but extra fact-checking from peer review does seem to help.

And there's a whole lot more of it than there was in the classical period, and a lot of it has got fitted together in a way away that ancient philosop hers would find hard to get their heads around.

No, nothing is "true" in a mathematical sense outside of mathematics that's right.

That's probably part of why mathematicians get into mathematics because once you prove something to be true in your formal system of choice it's true for all time, as opposed to say physics where it just might be that someone comes along tomorrow and develops a theory of the moon being made of green cheese that is much more useful and consistent with experiment than your moon-is-rocks theory.

Designing "high end" audio equipment sounds easier and more profitable, too

That's even easier that designing stuff that really works!

DeForest thought that he was modulating a flame. He believed that the tube had to contain gas to work.

He started with real flames, then put them into a bottle, and pushed electrodes around until it sort of worked. He didn't understand it and he did no math.

He prodded other people to think. Usually ideas come before science.

They were trying to make a jfet.

All metals looked alike before that?

He observed

Think.

What does 'believe' have to do with anything? That's just an hypothesis that he didn't disprove.

He observed and reported, and others filled in the theory behind him. That's all science.

They would certainly have been happy to do that, but showing that their competitors were unlikely to build a jfet to obsolete vacuum tubes was a worthwhile corporate enterprise as well. Research isn't always intended to prove a principle, it's important to disprove as well.

It was good research; everyone but you thinks so, and celebrates it.

Huh? Looked? He wasn't reporting on metallic appearance, but on the fact of the electrochemical activity. What drives you off on such a tangent?

On Sunday, 7 February 2021 at 16:51:14 UTC-8, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ...

Again your relative inexperience is showing - in many companies the 'Managers' can also be the creative people in a group leading other creative people. They are where I currently work.

There are also "independent contributors tracks", I had enough of managing 20 years ago.

I seem to remember that you used to manage?

Did the rule not apply to you?

Again a limited subset of engineers in a restricted range of businesses.

My experience has a different story from yours.

You seem to think we all need to be born here. Aren't you special? Methinks especially retarded. That is what you are.

That is a good sig for you, immature troll boy. After all, that is absolutely all you are.

If it's from a movie I think it's rather the villian from SE7EN