this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
1478 points (99.3% liked)

Science Memes

10923 readers
2007 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
1478
How to open a textbook (lemmy.world)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
66 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Statistical mechanics is so fucking brutal \m/

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

...and then we take the partial derivative of the log of this infinite sum wrt molar volume to find that--

- Why?

Why what?

- helplessly gestures at the whiteboard

Oh, yeah, it's so the math works out later! Anyway, for small Θ, the derivative has a nice closed form that we can Tailor expand in f-

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

Yeah lol, lots of physics and math was invented by multidisciplinary geniuses who saw equations that seemed to have no answer and said "oh yeah, this looks like a problem from biology that I've seen solved with this bit of fluid mechanics, and that problem can be solved with this complex trick from differential calculus. And you know, after we do that the whole system is starting to look like a circuit that uses properties from thermodynamics..."

Then your teacher and the textbook throws it on a white board and says "some smart dude figured out this was the way to solve this problem. It looks like this and it boils down to this equation. Don't ask questions."