I like that. But I wish to suggest that Einstein and Bohm might well have done EVEN BETTER with more maths. It is a belief that should at least be questioned that somehow, math gets "in the way" of insights and creativity.
I'm sure Einstein and Bohm could do basic calculus.I'm somewhat staggered at the idea of an engineer who can't do differential equations, complex variables (and contour integration), and transforms. That certainly doesn't describe any engineer who ever worked for me.
SY, things are to the point where a great many engineers (having passed the requisite courses) are reluctant to even attempt algebra. The simulators have spoiled us. It's Planet of the Apes time and some other exemplary movies. How many engineers rush to a simulator to calculate the values of a resistive voltage divider?
Did you watch the Curiousity landing? Did you hear the guy asked to provide the UT for the landing, having just given the Pacific Daylight Time? He didn't attempt it. People don't even hazard calculating anything anymore.
A sci-fi story in this connection, not a very good one but instructive: The Feeling of Power. The Feeling of Power - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yes I think you're right because the improved communicative ability would probably have led to more in-depth collaboration, more additional people working on related issues. In short, more synergy.
I think it deserves ridicule if that's the notion being promoted. It would be rather like claiming the English language 'got in the way' of Shakespeare's poetry
Before that, it was the pocket calculators which spoiled us. Although I think I was the first to wield one (a Sinclair Cambridge) in my secondary school class I was fortunate enough to have learned to use a slide rule first. Learning this taught me to get a feel for the order of magnitude of an expected answer, something people who grew up with electronic calculators probably never did.
So the later generation were always rather prey to mis-keyings
I'm sure Einstein and Bohm could do basic calculus.
words are deliberate.
They had to know it or they couldnt get a degree. They just didnt use it much in daily work. EE's worked for Physicists. They support their work at nat. labs. few EE need to do calculus in daily work... most didnt do research in electronics field but applied engineering to physics projects. the physicist did tremendous math work. LLNL has the largest, fastest, most powerful scientific computer complex in the world. [well may China is now or soon will] This means a lot of math and calcs... some so complex the fastest super computing machines would have to run all night on solving equations and still it wasnt as accurate as needed. We are always ahead of the computers in computing.
But that work is not being done by EE's.
math as a language matters - math "dialects" can reveal or obscure
Maxwell's (20 something?) Equations weren't very poetic before Gibbs Vector Algebra - Maxwell himself was in the process of rewriting them in Hamilton's Quaternion Algebra when he died
some would say the Maxwell's Equation t-shirt 4 line Gibbs Vector Calculus version for free space wave propagation still taught 1st today should be considered less than elegant following Einstein's Special Relativity meet up with Minkowski's non-Euclidean 4-space
(you can buy the t-shirt in either Integral or Differential versions too)
EM should properly be expressed in Minkowski Space-Time 4-Vectors - becomes 1 equation ~ "Coulomb's Law" - absent magnetic monopoles magnetic fields are just space-time transforms of moving charge's E fields
then you can choose between for example Tensors or Clifford Algebra for your non-Euclidean Vector Algebra dialect
disclaimer: I've just read some of the history, debate over Vector Algebras - haven't mastered the space-time math
but who wouldn't use modern math software?
or for toying with Geometric Algebra: (done in the free CluViz sw)
Maxwell's (20 something?) Equations weren't very poetic before Gibbs Vector Algebra - Maxwell himself was in the process of rewriting them in Hamilton's Quaternion Algebra when he died
some would say the Maxwell's Equation t-shirt 4 line Gibbs Vector Calculus version for free space wave propagation still taught 1st today should be considered less than elegant following Einstein's Special Relativity meet up with Minkowski's non-Euclidean 4-space
(you can buy the t-shirt in either Integral or Differential versions too)
EM should properly be expressed in Minkowski Space-Time 4-Vectors - becomes 1 equation ~ "Coulomb's Law" - absent magnetic monopoles magnetic fields are just space-time transforms of moving charge's E fields
then you can choose between for example Tensors or Clifford Algebra for your non-Euclidean Vector Algebra dialect
disclaimer: I've just read some of the history, debate over Vector Algebras - haven't mastered the space-time math
but who wouldn't use modern math software?
or for toying with Geometric Algebra: (done in the free CluViz sw)
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That says much about national labs, not positively.
Technicians (irrespective of credentials) don't use math. Engineers do. Your national lab apparently used degreed engineers as technicians?
Again, I can't imagine any of my engineers not being able to do these things nor not doing this things routinely. They would not be my engineers for very long. But in the private sector, we don't use engineers for routine tech work, we use (cheaper) techs. Engineers do engineering.
That says much about national labs, not positively.
Technicians (irrespective of credentials) don't use math. Engineers do. Your national lab apparently used degreed engineers as technicians?
Again, I can't imagine any of my engineers not being able to do these things nor not doing this things routinely. They would not be my engineers for very long. But in the private sector, we don't use engineers for routine tech work, we use (cheaper) techs. Engineers do engineering.
It's your national lab, too.
Actually, one of the reasons I finally left was because EE's didnt do much engineering any more. The custom design work became off-the-shelf products plugged together. Funds started getting tighter. Weapons design had been charactrized sufficiently that it was turned over to computer modeling. And, what was learned via underground tests can now be done by studying the plasma from the fusion laser program.
Not many now go into engineering let alone math as a career. Seems like it was dying when i was in it up to my neck. Now? Must be near zero. Finally, the national lab(s) have been turned over to private operators and no longer has the close ties to university.
The days of big time R&D projects and spending on them has just died away. Then it got boring and I left to go make some money. But, I miss those minds a lot.
Good to know EE are alive and well for you. I am concerned for this countries future with the general educational system going towards second world status. -RNM
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This has gone too far. What Richard Marsh is stating is the REALITY of electronic engineering, especially a few years ago, before computers virtually took over. His experience was like mine, when I was at Ampex.
In some cultures, a certain highly difficult diploma is mandatory, just to get a job with some challenge.
However, in the USA, if you can do the job, then you get to do it. This MAKES engineers from 'technicians', if they are motivated enough.
Solving Schrodinger's equation by hand, is not a serious prerequisite. That is only 'snobbery' or something similar.
It reminds me of a story from the '60's' where an 'expert' was sent to a South American country to debug a computer setup. Many 'top people' were shocked at his youth and appearance, so much so, that they did not want him near the computer.
Someone had to tell these people that he designed the computer, before he was finally allowed access. '-)
In some cultures, a certain highly difficult diploma is mandatory, just to get a job with some challenge.
However, in the USA, if you can do the job, then you get to do it. This MAKES engineers from 'technicians', if they are motivated enough.
Solving Schrodinger's equation by hand, is not a serious prerequisite. That is only 'snobbery' or something similar.
It reminds me of a story from the '60's' where an 'expert' was sent to a South American country to debug a computer setup. Many 'top people' were shocked at his youth and appearance, so much so, that they did not want him near the computer.
Someone had to tell these people that he designed the computer, before he was finally allowed access. '-)
The difficulty we have is that people who appear not to understand 'higher level math' still feel free to offer their opinions on its inapplicability to audio. (One could argue that Fourier is not higher level math anyway.) Responding to them can lead us further into the maths and they get even further out of their depth but they don't always realise this and we are sometimes too polite to say so at the time.RNMarsh said:
I remember many years ago a friend of mine, who was a dental technician, trying to tell me what was wrong with quantum mechanics; the fact that he had almost no idea how QM works did not seem to inhibit his confidence in criticising it.
Some physicists have an intuition which leads them to bright ideas, which in time experiment may or may not confirm. They can annoy mathematicians by taking short cuts which are either strictly unjustified, or unverified or uninvented. A classic example of this is the Dirac delta function. When Paul Dirac first invented it the mathematicians were horrified and told him that no such thing exists. He carried on using it and eventually they invented the theory of distributions and made it respectable. It wasn't that Dirac was bad at maths, it was just that he was ahead of the mathematicians. Something similar happened by Heaviside operational calculus.abraxalito said:
So the morale of this story is not that you can get by without maths, but that a smart enough physicist can use maths which has not yet been invented.
In the UK many EEs will never have seen Schrodinger's equation. However, I would expect someone designing semiconductor devices to at least know in principle how the periodic lattice potential generates energy bands. For the physicist that is second-year QM, so for the EE it ought to be third-year device physics.john curl said:
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I have been in super computing business for some period (as a post doc at the Research Center Rossendorf, Germany, and at several places before that), since 1989 till 2006, have personally created several computer programs based on Monte-Carlo and Molecular Dynamics approaches. We did simulations similar to what was done at LLNL (Tomas Diaz De La Rubia), and other kinds of simulations . This activity was in fact very close to Electrical Engineering, since our computer results for semiconductors were used for creating experimental setups, and experimental results affected semiconductor technology. These simulations are really useful, since they allow to "put hand on individual atoms" and to understand non-equilibrium processes in solids. We were in contact with many colleages from EE departments of various european universities.
Thinking about FFT simulations for designing audio gear, I continue to keep position, that they are not useful at their present state for TOP AUDIO. Maybe, if somebody will integrate properties of all passive components (including vibro-electrical properties) and properties of PCB and EM interactions between various components and traces, etc., etc., one will be able to design high-end gear by a computer.
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But no one ever said that, they are simply one tool for analyzing data, signals, whatever. (Present state?, strange comment)
So TOP AUDIO is designed by intuition and ear alone? Still seeking comments on, "I don't hear these things but my special friends do", and the steadfast refusal to verify that they actually do hear them (DBT doesn't "work", etc.). Martin C's careful description of each "flavor" of capacitor/resistor is a hoot.
The resistors even used at pico-watt level to boot.
That's ok..I am a patient man.But now you need "infinite" time
I only purchase ARB's with battery backup. it has been pre-programmed with all the waveforms I will ever need, and it also knows exactly when I will need them. in the future. It is my destiny..
20, 30 years in, many EE's no longer require the math to perform their jobs. Sometimes it's the branch of engineering that was taken, sometimes it's because a path of management was taken instead, and the skills are no longer exercised.
You were upper level when you left, right? It's a difficult career choice.
Actually, some are tied directly to universities. A lot of staff now has joint appointments. Research at the lab, teaching at the university.
Yep, that is scary indeed.
Of all the things I've lost over the years, I miss my mind the most...
I agree. Unfortunately, as simulation becomes better, fundamentals are lost. I've found this true where I work, as well as at LHC, ITER, to name a few.
jn
Vlad, I think you are right. Higher math and exotic computer simulations have little use in analog audio, especially the hi end stuff. The most IMPORTANT development for me, was the HP calculator. There are calculations that must be done, and this is the best way to do them, for most jobs.
Now, I am not against others doing SPICE sims of their circuitry. If it works for you, and it is faster and easier for you to do a design this way, then go to it, but usually the result, ultimately is 'cut and try' just like if you made a physical breadboard. The real difference is a matter of convenience.
Now, I am not against others doing SPICE sims of their circuitry. If it works for you, and it is faster and easier for you to do a design this way, then go to it, but usually the result, ultimately is 'cut and try' just like if you made a physical breadboard. The real difference is a matter of convenience.
That's only if you're Jimmy Stewart.
BTW, Do you or Dick ever read the IEEE Journal of the Instrumentation and Measurement Society? Folks frm NIST, etc. articles packed with calculus and math to back up results in almost every issue.
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John, john, will it ever stop? You really mean you have to be rather dumm and uneducated to hear differences?
jan
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