Re: acoustic impedances; what makes a good instrument

From: Mark Millonas (millonas@email.arc.nasa.gov)
Date: Tue Sep 16 2003 - 19:29:18 PDT


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<dl><div align=3D"center"><br><br>
<blockquote type=3Dcite class=3Dcite cite>
</dl>&nbsp;&nbsp; As far as science and mystery go, I also don't see why
they can't go together.&nbsp; </blockquote><br><br>
That absolutely *do* go together!&nbsp;&nbsp; It it almost always people
who don't know anything about science,<br>
especially as a process, that try to claim separation of these
things?&nbsp; Perhaps many people have never<br>
been exposed to real science and what they call science is just
engineering.&nbsp; The epiphenomena of science.<br><br>
My favorite guy to quote on this topic is Richard Feyman:&nbsp;=20
<br><br>
I found these:<br><br>

<dl>
<dd>&quot;But I would like not to underestimate the value of the world
view which is the result of scientific effort. The same thrill, the same
awe and mystery, comes again and again when we look at any question
deeply enough. With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful
mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned that
the answers may prove disappointing, with pleasure and confidence we turn
over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more
wonderful questions and mysteries - certainly a grand
adventure.&quot;<br><br>

<dd><font face=3D"Book Antiqua, Bookman" size=3D2>&quot;Poets say science
takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms.
Nothing is &quot;mere.&quot; I too can see the stars on a desert night,
and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens
stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can
catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part
-- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is
belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all
apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all
together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does not
do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous
is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of
the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter
if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane
and ammonia must be silent?&quot;</font> <br><br>
</dl>But my favorite one which I can't perfectly remember, from an
interview, and paraphrased here is something like:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>&quot;Some people say that science ruins the pure aesthetic
appreciation of nature.&nbsp; Nothing could be further from the
truth!&nbsp; While
<dd>my appreciation of a flower, for instance, may not be a refined and
sophisticated as the artist's, that beauty is assessable to me.
<dd>But the point is that there is beauty not only on this level --- it
goes all the way through.&nbsp; As a scientist I have access to all the
levels.&nbsp; I know that
<dd>the flower is made up of atoms.&nbsp; I know that I am made up of the
same kinds of atoms.&nbsp; I know that beneath the
<dd>exterior there are complicated chemical processes going on.&nbsp; I
know that the color, while beautiful, is there for a reason -- that it
evolved to
<dd>attract bees.&nbsp; It begs a question, does this sense of beauty
extend to other orders of life, and does the bee have a perception
<dd>of the flower as beautiful...and so on.&nbsp; So you see appreciation
of the beauty of nature is only *enhanced* by science.&nbsp; It *can*
only be
<dd>enhanced.&nbsp; I don't see how it ever diminishes it!&quot;<br>
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