On Mar 22, 2005, at 12:30 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
When i was a senior in high school, we were using an electron microscope and a mass spectrometer to conduct some qualitative analysis on a piece of molybdenum steel. The reason we had these machines to use was because they had been donated to the school. They were now obsolete because the new machines had computers that could perform most of the functions without the opertaor having to perform any calculations.
One of my classmates asked the teacher, "If they know have machines that can do the work without us having to do any calculations, isn't this a waste of time?" The teacher responded, "Any fool, can be taught to operate a machine. You're being taught how to solve the problem yourself."
This story reminds me of a similar one of my own -- when I was in college (1991-5), we used antique precision balances that had been discarded by the Los Alamos labs some years before in favor of electronic ones. They had little adjustable chains for the ten-thousandths of grams, and brass vermeer scales, and mahogany cases . The old ones weren't any more accurate than electronic ones would have been, and probably cost more to maintain than they would have to replace (for one thing, they could have been sold as antiques). They were far more finicky to use -- the way that they got calibrated each year was that a technician would come with a set of master weights and weigh all of the college's weights and record that (for example) the one-gram one was actually .9997 grams. This was why we still used them -- the lab director was a Buddhist and thought (and had convinced the faculty) that we needed to really understand what it meant to weigh something.
daniel
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