This "working it out on paper" vs. real life reminded me of an aha!
event from my high school days. Sometime after I had taken a drafting
course in high school I was attending a career day presentation where
one of the speakers was a GM truck design engineer. He was talking
about solving various problems in chassis design when it occurred to me
that, trying to determine the length of the fuel line snaking its way
from fuel tank to engine in 3 dimensions and based only on a 2
dimensional drawing must be very complicated. I asked him how they did
it. He was very kind in not laughing at me as he explained that they
simply waited until the chassis model was built, went down to the shop
and routed a piece of tubing between tank and engine, removed it and
then stretched it out and measured it. Aha! I think that's the day I
realized the difference between science and engineering.
Chuck Norcutt
Moose wrote:
>
> I though for years that the visualization thing had been some sort of
> cheating, or something, and that real physicists worked it all out on
> paper. So I was very pleased when I found out that Richard Feynman, the
> Nobel Prize winner in Quantum Mechanics and famous teacher said that was
> how all his discoveries were made. He visualized it in his head first,
> then figured out how to do the math to show it to others and experiments
> to verify it.
>
> Moose
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