Sometimes I feel sorry for the non-engineering interns I work with. We’re kind of a geeky group and we work together every day, so most of our lunch conversations center around our projects and research and test fixtures. This would work out a lot better if the intern lunch table were all engineers – but it’s not.
So as I was about to express my newfound fascination with something whose explanation would inevitably include a healthy dose of physics theory, I realized something -
To appreciate a lot of things in life, you have to be familiar with them. I have a really hard time getting excited about groundbreaking advances in financial planning practices, mostly because I know very little about it. I can’t really make valuable contributions to an emphatic discussion on search engine optimization (aka becoming the first page listed in a google search for a given topic – which, thanks to Josh, this website is) or the latest and greatest FTP software. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I don’t know anything about it.
I’m starting to understand that it’s very difficult to become truly excited about an advancement or a new discovery unless you had a very personal knowledge of the challenges it overcame. If you have agonized for hours over the severe constraints of mechanical advantage in the system you’re studying and then have a moment of enlightenment that solves your design woes, you can emphatically scribble your equations on a white board, thoughts jumbling with excitement, eyes bright with discovery, all to realize that YOU’RE EXCITED ABOUT IT BECAUSE YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHY IT’S A BIG DEAL. And unfortunately for you, not everyone you try to explain it to will be quite as floored by your newfound ability to seemingly defy the laws of physics (thought that might be stretching it a little).
In short, you have to know the intimate details of how high a wall is to appreciate the jump that successfully clears it.
The wall looks shorter the further you’re standing from it.
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