5 ms·

Speaking as someone just graduating high school in India, this sort of unintuitive convention discrepancy often flummoxes people at the 9th grade level, causing

Speaking as someone just graduating high school in India, this sort of unintuitive convention discrepancy often flummoxes people at the 9th grade level, causing them to drop out of Physics altogether. Once you drop Physics, it's essentially impossible to get onto the Engineering or CS tracks in India, and U.S. universities are often too expensive.

VLM 13y ago
I've occasionally considered that most of my "engineering training" is all about working around human weirdness like this. On the bright side someone dropping out because of i vs j won't have to suffer through conventional current vs electron current, aka the same thing as the right hand rule vs the left hand ("FBI") rule. Even worse some call the RHR the generator rule and the LHR the motor rule. This is a cousin of people confusing right and left hand circular polarization of antennas vs waves etc. Somewhat more practically old fashioned electrolytic capacitors pretty much always mark the negative lead with a black mark or stripe in excess of 99.99% of the time (yeah I've seen at least 10K and never seen an exception yet). However I have to crack open a datasheet every time for every tantalum because a "large fraction" of them mark the positive instead of the negative... lovely. This is before we start playing games with some people talking about RMS voltages, some peak, some pk-pk. I believe this is why many engineers don't care about imperial vs metric. Its just another example of standards being so desirable we'd like to have as many as possible. Whats one more?
PeterWhittaker 13y ago
Perhaps my comment will be considered harsh, but my view has long been that if you are hung up on the notation, you miss the physics, you miss the science. There is no such as "an intuitive convention". Notation is simply that: Convention. If someone cannot grasp this, they lack either or both of the intellectual maturity and the doggedness necessary to understand the science. If teachers failed to make the point that notation is simply convention, chosen for largely historical reasons, then they have not helped the situation - but fundamentally it is up to the student to see past, to see through the conventions and to perceive what the notation is saying. Why does "W" represent the "wa" sound? Convention. Do you see the individual letters or do you read the words, the sentences? Arguing whether you should use i or j for square root -1 is like arguing whether you should o or u for a particular vowel sound.
- jonpeda 13y ago
  > If someone cannot grasp this, they lack either or both of the intellectual maturity Yes, that's entirely the point! >> flummoxes people at the 9th grade level, > There is no such as "an intuitive convention". consistency is intuitive. inconsistency is unintuitive. That's not the same as a hypothetical complaint that a certain convention is unintuitive.
  - claudius 13y ago
    Even if we set out to build an entirely consistent set of notation for use in all of physics, maths and engineering today, we would face obvious problems, mostly that there are only about 100 different symbols (Latin + Greek + some extras) with maybe a handful of modifiers (primes, dots, tildes…and no, combining them is not good) and typefaces (difficult to replicate in handwriting). So if we wanted to name every quantity and every concept possibly encountered by physics/maths/engineering today consistently, we already would have a hard time fitting everything in. Add to this that you also need a ‘working space’ of free, unencumbered symbols, a space of symbols free to use in the future[0] and the possibility that seemingly unrelated concepts today might well be linked in a few years time, and you will come to the conclusion that there is no way we could possibly build a consistent set of notation. Really, be happy with what we have at the moment, choose a convention suitable to your current field of work[1] and everything will be fine. [0] Some people started using Arab letters for new mathematical functions. Try googling for that. [1] Or even invent the n-th one if you work at the edge of two existing fields or recognise that you can get stuff done more easily if you choose other symbols.
    - marblar 13y ago
      Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- morpher 13y ago
  Although I largely agree with your point that gettin hung up on notation is missing the forest for the trees, you should not entirely dismiss the art of good notation. For example, Leibniz differentials make the chain rule seem "obvious" due to its analogy with standard fractions. But, I agree that people who get hung up on the same symbol having different unrelated meanings or different symbols having the same meaning will have a hard time learning the physics beneath the symbols.
signa11 13y ago
> this sort of unintuitive convention discrepancy often flummoxes people at the 9th grade level, causing them to drop out of Physics altogether that's a rather weirdly extreme reaction to a notation, imho. it is just a 'convention', accept and move on. is there something more than meets the 'i' ?
Pxtl 13y ago
I'd think tau vs. pi does far more damage to our kids learning. Radians would be so much easier for highschoolers to grasp if it was 1tau per revolution instead of 2pi.

VLM 13y ago

I've occasionally considered that most of my "engineering training" is all about working around human weirdness like this. On the bright side someone dropping out because of i vs j won't have to suffer through conventional current vs electron current, aka the same thing as the right hand rule vs the left hand ("FBI") rule. Even worse some call the RHR the generator rule and the LHR the motor rule. This is a cousin of people confusing right and left hand circular polarization of antennas vs waves etc. Somewhat more practically old fashioned electrolytic capacitors pretty much always mark the negative lead with a black mark or stripe in excess of 99.99% of the time (yeah I've seen at least 10K and never seen an exception yet). However I have to crack open a datasheet every time for every tantalum because a "large fraction" of them mark the positive instead of the negative... lovely. This is before we start playing games with some people talking about RMS voltages, some peak, some pk-pk. I believe this is why many engineers don't care about imperial vs metric. Its just another example of standards being so desirable we'd like to have as many as possible. Whats one more?

PeterWhittaker 13y ago

Perhaps my comment will be considered harsh, but my view has long been that if you are hung up on the notation, you miss the physics, you miss the science. There is no such as "an intuitive convention". Notation is simply that: Convention. If someone cannot grasp this, they lack either or both of the intellectual maturity and the doggedness necessary to understand the science. If teachers failed to make the point that notation is simply convention, chosen for largely historical reasons, then they have not helped the situation - but fundamentally it is up to the student to see past, to see through the conventions and to perceive what the notation is saying. Why does "W" represent the "wa" sound? Convention. Do you see the individual letters or do you read the words, the sentences? Arguing whether you should use i or j for square root -1 is like arguing whether you should o or u for a particular vowel sound.

jonpeda 13y ago
> If someone cannot grasp this, they lack either or both of the intellectual maturity Yes, that's entirely the point! >> flummoxes people at the 9th grade level, > There is no such as "an intuitive convention". consistency is intuitive. inconsistency is unintuitive. That's not the same as a hypothetical complaint that a certain convention is unintuitive.
- claudius 13y ago
  Even if we set out to build an entirely consistent set of notation for use in all of physics, maths and engineering today, we would face obvious problems, mostly that there are only about 100 different symbols (Latin + Greek + some extras) with maybe a handful of modifiers (primes, dots, tildes…and no, combining them is not good) and typefaces (difficult to replicate in handwriting). So if we wanted to name every quantity and every concept possibly encountered by physics/maths/engineering today consistently, we already would have a hard time fitting everything in. Add to this that you also need a ‘working space’ of free, unencumbered symbols, a space of symbols free to use in the future[0] and the possibility that seemingly unrelated concepts today might well be linked in a few years time, and you will come to the conclusion that there is no way we could possibly build a consistent set of notation. Really, be happy with what we have at the moment, choose a convention suitable to your current field of work[1] and everything will be fine. [0] Some people started using Arab letters for new mathematical functions. Try googling for that. [1] Or even invent the n-th one if you work at the edge of two existing fields or recognise that you can get stuff done more easily if you choose other symbols.
  - marblar 13y ago
    Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
morpher 13y ago
Although I largely agree with your point that gettin hung up on notation is missing the forest for the trees, you should not entirely dismiss the art of good notation. For example, Leibniz differentials make the chain rule seem "obvious" due to its analogy with standard fractions. But, I agree that people who get hung up on the same symbol having different unrelated meanings or different symbols having the same meaning will have a hard time learning the physics beneath the symbols.

signa11 13y ago

> this sort of unintuitive convention discrepancy often flummoxes people at the 9th grade level, causing them to drop out of Physics altogether that's a rather weirdly extreme reaction to a notation, imho. it is just a 'convention', accept and move on. is there something more than meets the 'i' ?

Pxtl 13y ago

I'd think tau vs. pi does far more damage to our kids learning. Radians would be so much easier for highschoolers to grasp if it was 1tau per revolution instead of 2pi.