Propeller Head Plaza

Electronics too...

64.13.14.96

In Reply to: RE: Hempel once said philosophy of science discussions are not for scientists. posted by Andy.G on July 09, 2008 at 00:04:07

We're as empirical as the next guy. Or at least were. One of my pride and joys is a pristine copy of Terman's Radio Engineer's Handbook, 1943 edition.

It may not seem like much now, but in it's day it and the ITT handbook were the bibles. It's just full of graphs, nomographs and formulas with some of the strangest constants that you've ever seen. The place I worked when I was introduced to it had a copy in the engineering library that had been used so much that it was just about a pile of loose pages. And you had to hunt those down because someone was always using it. So finding mine in a used bookshop was striking gold.

Of course that was the slide-rule era and if you really wanted to know something about, say the skin-depth of a conductor, it was that or build and measure. I still find it sort of freaky that now while relaxing in my easy chair and running free software on my laptop that I can just do a finite element analysis of the conductor and see the current density in living color. Of course to make sure nothing has gone awry, I check it with Terman. Old dogs and all that...

Rick

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