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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. The
by PeterWhittaker 14y 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 14y 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 14y agoEven 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 14y agoRelevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- morpher 14y agoAlthough 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.