Tuesday 28 January 2014

Rocket Science and its Contraries

"It isn't rocket science" has become a cliché for 'easy'.

Yet the science behind rockets is not at all recondite. It's a matter of gas pressure, momentum and viscosity. The details involve complicated calculations, but that shouldn't worry the owner of a calculator.

For difficult maths and science, consider the Riemann zeta function, or the eigenvalues of a quantum operator. Alas, most people feel no perplexity about those questions, because they've never even heard of them.



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