this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
353 points (97.8% liked)

Science Memes

10309 readers
1105 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.


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
353
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (5 children)

This rule always pissed me off because it makes absolutely no sense to me and it's terrible as a shorthand but my physics professors could not stop preaching it for any length of time to come up with something better

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Does this help? Short of making sure that your fingers actually are mutually orthogonal. The perspective in OP's picture is all fucked up and also not consistent between the hand and arrows.

"x,y,z" of course is an easy order you learned it in primary school, for it to make sense for the physics you need to... do nothing. Order is arbitrary. The handedness is dictated by the signs of the vectors, I guess if you were to flip the sign of some natural constant the whole thing would suddenly be left-handed.

It of course is also not an explanation of why the stuff is like it is. You say handedness plus assigning things to fingers is terrible as a shorthand? Show me something better, then. Meanwhile, generations of graphics programmers could and can be observed holding out their hand like that and rotating it every which way to make sense of what other people preferring different orientations did. Or keeping track of local vs. global transforms. Gotta know where the wheels are even if the car is flipped over.

(and, yes, for some reason there's no 3d software which uses x as the up/down axis. Whether that means that the industry has a bit of sanity left in it I'm not so sure it might be an accident).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Speak of the devil...

I know what a 3 dimensional axis looks like. Trying to make my cram my hand into a poor approximation of one does not help me personally understand fields.

I don't know how I should be the one to come up with a better shorthand if I'm the one being taught and not understanding.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I don’t know how I should be the one to come up with a better shorthand if I’m the one being taught and not understanding.

There is no better one. Your hand is the only obvious, also, convenient, piece of equipment you always have at the ready that is capable of clearly and intuitively representing three mutually orthogonal vectors. They also happen to be quite freely orientable in space. There are exactly two distinct ways axes can be constructed in 3d, and your left and right hand naturally show the one or the other, try it: While making fancy fingerguns you can never have all fingers be parallel, if two pairs are parallel then the third is antiparallel. You could use fancy terms like chirality but that literally means handedness.

And if you had tried to come up with something better you'd probably have realised all that.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)