I love the way Xavier Physics professors use math in demonstration of a concept. They do so in a manner befitting a vaudville magician or snake oil salesman:
“Let’s just consider this tiny bit of charge , dq,” he coyly suggests, knowing full well we’ll be doing integrals before the day is done. “Now, Tell ya what I’m gonna do. We’ll say, just between the two of us now, that this little bit of volume dtau here, is the same as r squared dtheta, because it’s so small we can act like it’s a little cube. ” And with a flick of the wrist, he’s got his assistant magically showing the voltage due to concentric cylinders of charge.
Today we converted an integral to find the period of a pendulum from some complicated form into a different from that would be easier to integrate. There was a factor of four in the complicated equation derived from the physical model, and this factor dissapeared in the new form. A fellow student seemed very suspicious of this, as if it were all a trick or something. “We’re going to divide this side by cosine theta, ” announces Dr. Schmitzer, and immediately this guy Erich goes “So is that where the four goes? How’s it come out of there?” as if she were demonstrating Dr. Heidrun Schmitzer’s Magicke Elixir and Nerve Tonic, and he wanted to know just how the thing worked.
