Pithy Engineering

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In a convo about optical efficiency, I asked my boss what the f-stop on his glasses would be. I implied that I thought they'd be near-zero loss. He immediately and succinctly asked me if there were reflections on the outside, and in one second I figured out that they are indeed lossy. Light bounced back is not passed through. Loss.

Of course, as I sit to write this, freshly poured diet something-or-other (thanks Charlie), I cannot recall all of the other times I've heard these eloquent summaries of scientific thought. Fortune-cookie slips that sum up universal truths. The number of times I've asked or been asked “What's the route?” when a computer refuses to talk to its friends has to qualify in this. It's the kick in the head that points out the obvious. And we all need that sometimes.

Oh, I remember one. Spouting a hypothesis by an SF author I was reading at the time, I quoted the absence of any formula tying past to present, present to future. My then-boss (hmm...no pattern there, really) immediately spouted “F=MA” and he was right: causality exemplified. Ruined that author's premise too, because without linked causality, his time-tripping story “solved” some of the contradictions of that sub-genre.

I'm trying to remember any of the 11,000,000 such quick-minded phrases Mr. Meyers taught me in my youth. Mr. Meyers was a friend of my parents, a retired engineer from Univac, he spent some time in WWII working on depth-charges. This man was an Engineer, friends. A real, degreed, dyed-in-the-wool, slide-rule toting engineer. In the Apollo era, this guy fit right in. He played with computers when they made the Oracle of Delphi look like a public library.

Mr. Meyers taught me to mow left around obstacles, because you can get in tighter on the side opposite the discharge chute. He started me on taking things apart. Which lead to my learning to put them back together. I learned about metal-fatigue, stress-limits, how to not cut yourself when using sharp tools, and a whole life's outlook towards machines, tech, and how “broken” really is just a temporary state of affairs.

Think back to your favorite science teacher, was there one phrase or line that she repeated? Other than “wake up.” Or a math teacher that hit something so golden and proper in one sentence that to this day you still feel the resonance? Think slowly, there has to be one. Now go find a kid, and teach it to them.