3 ms·

This is criminally under taught and under used

• maxbond 3y ago
  Once I casually mentioned dimensional analysis/quantity calculus to a programmer who worked at CERN, doing scientific computing. They had never heard of it. They had already worked out the hard way that you could do this stuff, but they thought of it as a hack. They were pumped to find out there was a theory behind it and it wasn't just ad-hoc duct taping. That really surprised me. I'm not that smart or educated. I think they either had a masters degree or were a master's student (can't recall precisely).
  • thsksbd 3y ago
    Myself i saw it once in a one semester fluid class for two lectures. A class on the Buckingham pi theorem and another on using units to hack simple physical models. To be fair, fluid engineers and the like see this a lot though (because of All their dim-less numbers). But ECE, physics, CS, chemistry etc majors? Almost nada.
• devnullbrain 3y ago
  That makes it an advantage if you learn it early enough. Some physics questions all the way up to college can be trivialised by understanding the units of the inputs and answer.
  • thsksbd 3y ago
    You can trivialize a lot past grad school with this.
• hirundo 3y ago
  I oppose making a failure to teach dimensional analysis with the physical sciences a crime, but it fits nicely as a tort of professional negligence, aka malpractice. It might be tricky to get that by the teachers unions though.