Salinas

Salinas River

Up in Salinas there is a tiny state park along the coast. There is hardly anyone around, and its a good place to go for secluded shoreline, with a few fisherman around to remind you of whats good for you.

While I was talking about Feynman I was thinking about a professor of mine that had a great influence on my thinking. He was part of an interesting experiment back in the 1970's where engineering students got trained in thinking about things as systems. Kantor had been a physicist, but he got involved in the "Save Lake Erie" project in the 1960s, and after they saved it, he stayed involved in teaching the interdisciplinary approach.

So I took his introductory classes as a freshman, and he had some very good material that he introduced to me and a bunch of other students from a lot of different disciplines. I was very interested in his class, and found the material and the presentation more interesting than any of my other work.

Now by the time I should have graduated this curriculum had developed even further, but the students were no longer interested, and the complex systems department was cancelled. Kantor stayed around for awhile and was quoted in the student newspaper as wondering why the program had been cancelled, and saying he still had the class notes for the classes he used to teach.

Now thirty years have gone by and I have an impression about the question as to whether complex systems was worth it. As a freshman engineering student it was a dangerous thing to teach me how to think. Up to the 1960's and through the JFK shooting/war years engineering schools had developed an approach of "damn the torpedoes, teach the kids the fundamentals of science" Kantor's approach was somewhat contrary: "teach the kids how to think and how to apply concepts across disciplinary lines" This is working against the engineering deans who are trying to cram as much stuff into the student's head in the four short years that they have him.

Now which one is better I don't know, there is simply way too much basic engineering to learn in only four years, and so much specialization that every engineering school is required to teach a specialty on top of the basics.

So when I was in school they were still cramming the stuff in as fast as they could, hoping to familiarize the students with all the basics. And what happened to me was that I got the reputation for understanding things, being able to apply the time lags and dynamic responses from electronic circuit theory to my daily life - such as how long I had to study something to retain it until the day after the test.

This was not especially good for my grades, as I was distracted by it, and so I was behind on a lot of classes. The best classes that I could have benefited from were thermo, fields, and linear algebra, and since those are essentials, you can say that I never got the basic engineering education. But Kantor taught me how to think, so maybe I learned as much as the others and then some. They never recovered from cramming, but they are more familiar with it if they need it. Me on the other hand, I dropped out mainly because I had been taught to think, and I can still think. Thermo and fields don't seem that hard to me, but the homeworks seem redundant and boring for what I want, but I never got that good degree. Seven years as a sophomore, down the drain.

So I think Kantor's stuff is incompatible with engineering the way it was taught in 1978. But it's good stuff! As interesting as a taped Feynman lecture! And what good are a bunch of educated engineers if they can't think. They get to be like the NASA guys, who are commonly described as being on happy pills. The things they say and do are so incompatible with reality, and so much under the microscope, that they seem high.

Anyway all this talk about alternative approaches to the problem - what IS the problem anyway? - reminds me of something I read a few years ago in some old papers that came out of Germany. Written during the war these papers did not get published at all until the early 1950's and never got the widespread distribution that they would have gotten if they were published in Journal of Fluids.

But one particular paper stands out as a direct contrast with the important work by Kantrowitz that I talked about earlier. This work casts new light on his little known work, work that I said was never famous in the first place. German science had faced a similar problem with combustion calculations and had tried to solve it using electron spectroscopy to find out what was happening with the atoms. The paper I read had a different focus - the particular problem to be solved was to find out how much vibrational heat different molecules could absorb.

The German approach began by talking about electron shapes, vibrations, and molal heat absorption rates, and so on. Its a pretty big contrast with Kantrowitz and I think it is a demonstration of the American approach to problems: fiddle with it. American engineers have inherited techniques from Yankee tinkerers so that from Edison to the Wright Brothers, to Hewlett and Packard, and Jobs and Wozniak, our development comes from tinkering in the garage.

The apocryphal story is that Edison found thousands of ways not to make a light bulb, but on the other hand when the German Nernst invented neon, he did some math, said to himself "this ought to work" and went out in the lab and built it. It worked the first time. To finish off this good story about American tinkering there is a good argument to be made for the fact that tinkering with Model T trucks and cars gave the Americans a huge edge over Germany during the war - we had thousands of men who were able to tinker with a two and a half ton truck and keep it running, and the Germans did not have anything like that. On the other hand, they had some pretty fantastic technology at wars end including rockets and jet planes, and guided missiles.

If you watch the movie "Where Eagles Dare" they also had a helicopter and some little cars that were very light weight and ran on electricity, if you listen to the engines whine. Now if you want to know why I think they were light weight (no batteries) then just watch them when they flip over. I'm sure the director put in those scenes with the lightweight cars flipping over in order to show that they didn't have any heavy batteries. Either they had a superconducting inductor to store the power, or they had some kind of electric grid intercepting neutrons from a radioactive source the way that a solar panel intercepts photons to make power. Since the war was "almost over", it didn't matter if some soldiers got exposed briefly to high amounts of radioactivity. The war was almost over, and had been since 1940.

Here is one thing the German wartime scientist Shaefer said while discussing his study on the vibrations of atoms:

"an investigation by Kneser on the acoustic absorption and dispersion in gaseous Nitrogen Oxide between frequencies of 300 to 3000 cycles per second was made for determining the speed at which the excited state above the basic state of the NO was formed. This excited state differs from the basic state merely by a changed spin adjustment and furnishes a noticable contribution to the molal heat in the temperature range at and below room temperature."

This kind of talk is quite a contrast with Kantrowitz's unsupported speculation that vibration rates might have something to do with his combustion problem. In addition it raises the interesting speculation that music that resonates on 300 to 3000 Herz will also warm up the molal heat of the air in a room, through spin. I think this is so, my experience is that music warms up a room, and I also think that the photons in sunlight also contribute to the molal heat of a gas through spin. The photons make the N2 molecule spin. In my opinion these are the reasons why the Hopi character called Kokopelli is generally shown playing a flute while making some soup in the sun. The soup pot is generally mounted on a flexible leather blanket so that it can more easily be made to vibrate. Kokopelli was right - cooking is better when done to music while out in the sun.

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PS What Shaefer was doing was measuring the atomic vibration characteristics and their ability to absorb energy during short periods. They were studying the heat characteristics of the atoms in order to support studies of the Raman effect - the way atoms diffuse light. They found that molecules were more likely to accept heat from translational collisions with other molecules, rather that from the unlikely vibrational collisions. In addition the German scientists found that the more complicated longer molecules or angular molecules did not generally maintain a symmetric form, but varied their forms in a statistical way depending on the rotation of their various molecular components. They speculated that it was possible to align the angular molecules using magnetic fields, a topic I want to talk about tomorrow.