/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.6028876]

Is rocket science actually hard? Why do people refer to rocket science when they see something complicated?

[Anonymous No.6028881]

Because it involves a fuckload of math.

[Anonymous No.6028884]

doesn't seem so.

i think the saying is really old, and the reason is people were like really bad at math 50 years ago.

[Anonymous No.6028887]

>>6028881
>proving theorems
>rocket science
choose one

It does not involve any math.

[Anonymous No.6028890]

>>6028887
>thinking rocket science requires no math

Don't you have an arts assignment to complete?

[Anonymous No.6028899]

>>6028890
it's not math if wolfram alpha can calculate it.

[Anonymous No.6028900]

>>6028899
Well, that's your wrong opinion. I'm no longer sure you're an arts major. You strike me as more of a fem-lit major

[Anonymous No.6028904]

Because you see a rocket.

You see how fucking big it is and how it carries not only it's payload but some dreams and hopes with it as well.


Now, rocket science in itself is nothing more than just about any field of engineering you can think of put together. So naturally, anyone associated with rocket design and construction was pretty smart.

It's the image of scientists in the cold war space race making these huge rockets to carry man into another world that gave rise to the 'ideal' of a rocket scientist and how hard rockets science is.

[Anonymous No.6028907]

>>6028904
To add to that, people working on particle colliders and stuff the public doesn't get to see don't get as much appreciation or attention than their rocket-brethren.

TL;DR: Because more people know about rocket science.

[Anonymous No.6028911]

>>6028890
It doesn't. Unless you're proving theorems you're not doing math.

[Anonymous No.6028915]

>>6028911
>maths is only about proving theorems
Pretty sure no mathematician would agree with that

[Anonymous No.6028945]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcWRc1wK3gM&feature=relmfu
taunts, trash talk, in one word : Quake =D

[Anonymous No.6028953]

rocket science is piss easy
rocket ENGINEERING is the difficult shit
i wouldn't touch that with a barge pole

[Anonymous No.6028954]

>>6028876
>Is rocket science actually hard?
Involves materials science, orbital mechanics, aerodynamics, radio and telecommunications, electronics/control theory for all the shit that needs to be automated, gas and fluid dynamics at buttfuck insane pressures/acoustic environments and temperatures, chemistry for the fuels etc.

No, OP, sounds like a piece of cake.

[Anonymous No.6028966]

>>6028915
I do not know of any mathematician who would not agree.

[Anonymous No.6028994]

It's actually easier than plane science because there's no air to worry about.

[Anonymous No.6028999]

>Is rocket science actually hard?
The basic principles are quite simple, to actually make it work is extremely complicated, the more I learn about parts of it the more complicated it gets.
>Why do people refer to rocket science when they see something complicated?
Because it is hard

[Anonymous No.6029014]

So physics involves zero math as well then?

[Anonymous No.6029017]

>>6029014
If you do it right.

[Anonymous No.6029023]

>>6029014
>So physics involves zero math as well then?
>>6029017
>If you do it right.
You mean if you do it wrong. Mathematics is the language of physics.

[Anonymous No.6029024]

>>6029014
No, in physics there's a couple movements that are actually proving theorems and doing math (and not just string theorists). The most notable stuff is the group theory stuff done in quantum physics (though group theory is considered babby math by mathematician standards), as well as the axiomatizations people are trying to form to create consistent systems on which to base their hypothesis.

[Anonymous No.6029026]

>>6029023
>Mathematics is the language of physics.

>mfw physicists actually believe this.

[Anonymous No.6029027]

>>6028911
implying you're not proving theorems in rocket science

[Anonymous No.6029030]

>>6029027
You do understand that the scientific method and the mathematical method are inherently different, right? You cannot prove any theorems with hypothesis, experiments, and evidence. No matter how much evidence you have. Modern mathematicians don't even consider mathematics to have anything to do with the real world.

[Anonymous No.6029036]

>>6029030
>implying you understand the first thing about making physical models

[Anonymous No.6029042]

>>6029036
>implying you understand the first thing about mathematical proofs.

[Anonymous No.6029049]

>>6029042
>implying you're not a first year undegrad futur dropout

[Anonymous No.6029050]

>>6028994
>rockets don't travel through air
Stop posting.

[Anonymous No.6029054]

>>6029049
>implying you're not a highschool student hoping to get a degree out of pop-sci articles.

[Anonymous No.6029067]

>>6029054
>implying you're a psychic

[Anonymous No.6029070]

>>6029067
I need to crash out, someone else take over for me until I wake up.

[Anonymous No.6029072]

How, in this day and age, do we have individuals who still think math exists independently of other schools of science/study/whatever, and more importantly, the physical world?

We may have invented the writing we use to refer to concepts, but we did not invent math like we invented the light bulb. Math exists as objectively as the rest of existence, we didn't just make it up and start applying it to the real world and use it in every application of science as it is applied to the physical world, and just HAPPENS to always work out. I promise we haven't spent hundreds years creating a system whose only purpose is to substantiate and validate itself.

>Math logic and real world logic can't be put together

If any "logic" cannot fit into universal model, then by definition, the reasoning/understanding is either incorrect or incomplete.

[Anonymous No.6029080]

>>6029072
You misunderstand the argument.

Allow me to illustrate it using parenthesis.

This is how physicists assume mathematics works.
(Our Universe(Math))

This is how mathematicians perceive mathematics
(Math(Our Universe)(Any Universe))

The issue isn't that mathematics isn't inherent in our universe, rather that it's more inherent at an even more fundamental level and is not bound to our universe. It may help to point out that mathematicians commonly deal with non-euclidean spaces as well as objects in spaces with very high dimensions. Things that could never exist in our physical world.

[Anonymous No.6029079]

Holy fuck /sci/'s dumber than I thought. The difficulty of rocket science comes from engineering, not science. All the science is already there.

Someone who has never built a rocket from scratch with their own homemade engine will never understand what is meant by engineering difficulty. Same for robotics, yeah it's all just programming, circuits and actuators, but until you've actually made one it'll seem fuck easy. And no, Lego NXT and Arduino don't fucking count.

And it's not enough to build a rocket or robot, it has to be good. So good job if you made a can opening robot, but it's fuck meaningless if it isn't faster than commercial ones out there.

Engineering difficulty is hard to explain to physics majors who've never made anything with their hands.

[Anonymous No.6029087]

http://www.engr.uconn.edu/~cassenti/Astrodynamics/
http://www.engr.uconn.edu/~cassenti/SpacePropulsion/

>that handwriting

[Anonymous No.6029091]

>>6029079

have you ever tried to build a toaster from scratch? it's impossible, but no one calls toaster science hard.

your argument proves nothing.

[Anonymous No.6029099]

>>6029091
>it's impossible
A couple of heating coils and some 1/16 inch metal wires. Maybe a case made of scrap sheet metal with some form of insulation between the coils and the exterior. The switch to toast the bread can be purely mechanical. A toaster's circuitry would be very simple to, it just needs read the knob that determines how dark to toast the bread and convert that into a time. Heat shielding may be required to protect this.

That's just my guess of the top of my head without any reference design or background research. To build a toaster from scratch may take me one long weekend to do by myself.

[Anonymous No.6029883]

>>6029099
I think that anon is referring to this pop-sci video.
http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch.html

In particular how to build a toaster from raw materials and didn't have the rest of modern society to rely on.

[Anonymous No.6029890]

>>6028876

John Carmack says is overrated.

[vegnagon !!xFwZpKERbGn No.6029904]

try building a model rocket from scratch, then realize how baby-tier level it is compared to 'real' rockets.Then realize its not all about getting them to lift off the ground, but to be accurate in time and position.After that you have your answer.

[Anonymous No.6029950]

>>6029904
>try building a model rocket from scratch, then realize that scaling factors are generally in favor of large rockets, so things get much easier as you make it bigger
There's a reason why nobody sends model-sized rockets to orbit.

Also: building a model rocket from scratch is one hell of a lot easier than building a lawnmower from scratch, but nobody refers to "lawnmower mechanics" as some holy domain of geniuses.

[Anonymous No.6029951]

>>6029890
John Carmack abandoned his clever rocket ideas one by one until his company just made conventional sounding rockets, and then went out of business.

[vegnagon !!xFwZpKERbGn No.6029957]

>>6029950
the point, and context of my post flew right over your head lol.

[Anonymous No.6029961]

>>6029957
I didn't miss anything, you just said something stupid.

"Try doing (practically unrelated activity) (with unreasonable constraint) and then you'll know that (thing most people don't do because it's inherently expensive, not because it's inherently difficult) is inherently difficult!"

[Anonymous No.6029964]

Mathematicians are to autistic to be good engineers. Engineers aren't autistic enough to be good mathematicians. /thread
Engineering a rocket isn't an easy task and most people are stupid. That's why rocket science is coined as being difficult. Junior level Mech E here. Sure grad level math is fuck tons difficult and makes math used in engineering seem simple that's why we make sure all the aspies in society are on top of it.

[Anonymous No.6029965]

>>6029961
>thing most people don't do because it's inherently expensive
Not to mention very heavily regulated.

Even if you could build an orbital rocket for $1000, you'd need to spend at least $10 million jumping through the necessary hoops to be allowed to fly it.

[Anonymous No.6029966]

>>6029890
John Carmack is an idiot savant.

[Anonymous No.6029971]

>>6029964
Engineers always try to compare themselves to mathematicians and somehow don't realize how embarrassing they look. It's like women's studies undergrads trying to compare themselves to engineers.

[vegnagon !!xFwZpKERbGn No.6029986]

>>6029961
oh ok..if that's how you feel about it :(

[Anonymous No.6029989]

>>6029986
Superficial.

[Anonymous No.6029994]

>>6029971
No I would never want to compare myself to a mathematician. 85% of them are autists and arrogant beyond repair. They are socially crippled and I pity them more than anything. Hopefully you're a 15%'er

[Anonymous No.6029995]

>>6029971
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy

[vegnagon !!xFwZpKERbGn No.6030000]

>>6029989
its just a picture of a small rocket engine.
don't let it scare you...

[Anonymous No.6030007]

>>6029965
>[citation needed]

[Anonymous No.6030012]

>>6029994
>mfw there's more females in mathematics than in physics or engineering
http://www.macalester.edu/~bressoud/pub/launchings/launchings_09_09.html

Engineers are the /r9k/ of STEM.

[Anonymous No.6030016]

>>6030012
yeah, there's a ton of girls in math, because omg teaching!

[Anonymous No.6030018]

>>6029995
Most groups really shouldn't. I think it hurts both sides when they do this. Social sciences trying to portray themselves as hard science just makes them look like pseudo science.

[Anonymous No.6030019]

>>6030007
>[citation needed] for guided ballistic missiles being heavily regulated
srs?

[Anonymous No.6030060]

>>6028876
Look "it's not rocket surgery" and the marginally less utilized "it's not brain surgery" are not selected because they are merely complicated. There are harder surgeries in medicine (transplant), there are more difficult fields in engineering, and there are more conceptually difficult fields in science (QM). These fields (rocket science and neurosurgery) are chosen not because the act itself is the most difficult but because the margin for error is really small while the penalty for error is high. Regardless of accuracy, the perception is that if you mess up with "rocket science" (aeronautical engineering I guess) then the rocket will crash and several people along with millions of dollars of equipment will be lost. At the same time, the calculations and other work in rocket science have to exact. Same with neurosurgery, margin of error is low because the brain is extremely sensitive, and penalty for error is high because the patient's life and existence(even if they "survive" a mistake they probably won't be the "same" person). This is what is meant when someone says "it's not rocket science", it doesn't mean the field is not conceptually advanced, or isn't important, it just means that the field has either a comparatively larger margin for error, or a comparatively smaller penalty for error.

[Anonymous No.6030085]

>>6030060
>"it's not rocket surgery" and the marginally less utilized "it's not brain rocketry"

[Anonymous No.6030884]

>>6030085
I love that anon too.

[Anonymous No.6030902]

>>6028899
WolframAlpha can't do it, if you think it can you have no idea what rocket scientists do nor do you know the limitations of a simple calculator like WolframAlpha.
>>6028966
There's plenty of mathematicians that would disagree. Actuaries, economists, and physicists have to build new models and solve new mathematics problems to apply to their field.
>>6029030
Wow...just wow...
Mathematics is much more than just proving theorems.

[Anonymous No.6030910]

>>6028876
>Is rocket science actually hard?

Yes, but no more than other advanced fields of engineering. There are other fields much more complicated.

>Why do people refer to rocket science when they see something complicated?

Think 30's, 40's, 50's. Rocket science was big and cutting edge. That's when the term got big.

[Anonymous No.6030916]

>>6028876
"rocket science" as in sending rockets into space, not just rockets generally

It's hard because it needs to be so precise

[Anonymous No.6031505]

i think the term was coined in reference to space science, as opposed to purely rocketry, so you have to consider all the encompassing planetary and moon orbits, rotation, changing gravity effects, radiation, mat science (reentry / space), etc etc.
of course even in specifically rocketry, there are amazing people, because ya know; reliability - somewhat important, and getting 100% on those things is an astounding achievement, balancing all the temperature and pressure requirements on our flimsy materials is kind of a big deal

[Anonymous No.6031901]

>>6030902
>Actuaries, economists, and physicists
These are not mathematicians and they do not do mathematics. They do not contribute to the body of knowledge that is mathematics.

[Anonymous No.6031922]

>>6031901
> They do not contribute to the body of knowledge that is mathematics.
That isn't what mathemagicians do.
You'd know this if you were a mathemagician or knew mathemagicians.

[Anonymous No.6031956]

>>6031922
>mathemagician
1/10 for getting a response

[Anonymous No.6031958]

>>6031956
I gave up trying to spell it.

[Anonymous No.6032016]

>>6031956
youtube.com/watch?v=M4vqr3_ROIk

[Anonymous No.6032021]

>>6031956
youtube.com/watch?v=DUU45dBFWOM

[Anonymous No.6032031]

>>6029080
Not the guy you were talking to, but this is a very interesting perspective. But what if another universe has entirely different physical/natural laws. would math not change?

[Anonymous No.6032437]

>>6032031
This is kind of a complex question and I can't answer it from a single perspective without being disingenuous.

In the foundations of mathematics there's a small variety of different perspectives regarding what exactly we're dealing with and each one has its merits and reasoning. A few of the most common perspectives are as follows. >Mathematics is subjective and deeply rooted in our intuition. Our axioms and mathematical structures arise from this intuition, for example we should construct the reals on something like the subjective interpretation of "time".
>Mathematics is objective and entirely unrelated to our intuition. Everything should be worked out in purely objective structures and definitions that don't inherently carry any extra meaning.
>Mathematics is inherent in the Universe. We don't create it, rather we discover and or approximate it.

I don't believe we can currently say that only one of those ideologies can be valid. Each one is practiced with a slightly different set of axioms and set theories, but just like different geometries I believe we should study them side by side.

So from my perspective, we have the inherent mathematics of the universe of which we've only discovered or approximated a small portion, then we have the objective mathematics that all humans in our universe know and can communicate at a somewhat objective level, and then we have the mathematics that each individual personally intuits even though they may not be able to properly put it into words or symbols. If the Universe were to be fundamentally different then I only believe the second of those three would change, in other words in the worst case scenario we'd only understand a different subset of the inherent mathematics. All are part of a larger picture in my perspective, however.

[Anonymous No.6032450]

I'm sure this has been answered in this thread already, but it's just a turn of phrase that requires something hard to work as a placeholder, and that placeholder was rocket science because the phrase came about in an era when rocket science seemed especially difficult, what with the public seeing boosters blowing up left and right and the feats of rocket men being hyped up like nothing else.

[Anonymous No.6032493]

>>6030000
>>6029986

really >>6029989
has a point.

people are just afraid of complexity. that's all.

and rocket science is more accessible to the plebs than accelerator physics.

[Anonymous No.6034005]

>>6028876
>Is rocket science actually hard?

Yes, incredibly....

>Why do people refer to rocket science when they see something complicated?

Orbital Mechanics.

Rocket science isn't all fuel and staging, ya know....

[Anonymous No.6034007]

>>6034005
Forgot link.... sorry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_mechanics

[Anonymous No.6034023]

>>6028904

yea and the ideal change all the time it was

rocket scientist (actually aerospace engineer)
brain surgeon
nuclear engineer
hacker
quantum physicist