Mathematicians go to the lab
Today in the class that I'm sitting in on, we headed down to the physics lab to try to measure the viscocity of water, corn oil, and liquid soap using a ball-drop viscometer. The basic idea is that you drop a BB in a column of the fluid and time how long it takes to get to the bottom, and from this and knowing the size of the BB and the difference in the densities of the BB and the fluid, you can compute the viscocity.
But we're mathematicians, and so it's been several years since we've been down to a lab of any kind other than the computer lab. For me however, it became less an experiment in fluid dynamics than one in group dynamics, or lack thereof. With 18 people and only 3 equipment set ups, there were 6 people per experiment, a certain recipe for disaster.
If someone had taken charge, delegated responsibilities, then everything could have gone smoothly. If people tried to communicate well, everything could have gone smoothly. Nobody did anything that was unkind or really even anything wrong in terms of lab techniques. People just start doing things in an uncoordinated fashion.
We each knew how to measure the mass of the beads, and so we just started basically trying to work independently but with the same equipment. Wait, why are you taking that off the scale, we going to measure...oh, I see you're going to measure them seperately. We could have just done that at the end and subtract to get the measurement, oh well. Of course I didn't really say much of this at a volume loud enough to change someone's mind.
Even something as simple as having too many people so that I had to sit on the side of the table behind the scale presented a problem. I could not read any measurement of weight. I didn't really complain, but this did kind of make me feel less a part of the group. What am I saying, there was no group.
For some reason, immediately after two other students and I carefully measured the volume of corn oil in the cyllinder and discussed our measurements to get a consensus, one of them poured out the oil for a reason that I don't understand. I think it was because we didn't have a measurement of the weight of the empty cyllinder, which we need to compute the density of the oil. Of course now our measure of the volume is completely useless. Actually it was pointless even before that because this cyllinder full of oil came from another group that was finished with it, and per the instructions of the guy running the lab, we were to just use their measurements of the density of the oil. I tried to tell this to the other students but they didn't listen. We eventually did use the other group's density measurement. Oh, these other two students when they talked to each only spoke in Chinese, which is not understood by the other four people in the group.
Then there were the two people in the group trying to do all the computations from the water experiment. Naturally no one brought a calculator down to the lab with us, and so one of them had to run upstairs and get one. But once that was solved, it became painfully obvious that one of my colleagues has only a very vague notion of how the metric system works. She's a better mathematician and fluid dynamicist than I am in many ways, but yet she didn't really know what the prefixes centi- and milli- meant. How is this possible?
For my part, I sort of just sat back and observed. I did end up releasing a couple of BBs at the end so that two other people could time them, and I provided the conversion from volume measure in liters to volume measured in cubic centimeters, but for me, the experiment truly did morph into watching six mathematicians try to drop BBs into a column of water, and wondering how much more smoothly things would have gone if there were only say two of us working together.
But we're mathematicians, and so it's been several years since we've been down to a lab of any kind other than the computer lab. For me however, it became less an experiment in fluid dynamics than one in group dynamics, or lack thereof. With 18 people and only 3 equipment set ups, there were 6 people per experiment, a certain recipe for disaster.
If someone had taken charge, delegated responsibilities, then everything could have gone smoothly. If people tried to communicate well, everything could have gone smoothly. Nobody did anything that was unkind or really even anything wrong in terms of lab techniques. People just start doing things in an uncoordinated fashion.
We each knew how to measure the mass of the beads, and so we just started basically trying to work independently but with the same equipment. Wait, why are you taking that off the scale, we going to measure...oh, I see you're going to measure them seperately. We could have just done that at the end and subtract to get the measurement, oh well. Of course I didn't really say much of this at a volume loud enough to change someone's mind.
Even something as simple as having too many people so that I had to sit on the side of the table behind the scale presented a problem. I could not read any measurement of weight. I didn't really complain, but this did kind of make me feel less a part of the group. What am I saying, there was no group.
For some reason, immediately after two other students and I carefully measured the volume of corn oil in the cyllinder and discussed our measurements to get a consensus, one of them poured out the oil for a reason that I don't understand. I think it was because we didn't have a measurement of the weight of the empty cyllinder, which we need to compute the density of the oil. Of course now our measure of the volume is completely useless. Actually it was pointless even before that because this cyllinder full of oil came from another group that was finished with it, and per the instructions of the guy running the lab, we were to just use their measurements of the density of the oil. I tried to tell this to the other students but they didn't listen. We eventually did use the other group's density measurement. Oh, these other two students when they talked to each only spoke in Chinese, which is not understood by the other four people in the group.
Then there were the two people in the group trying to do all the computations from the water experiment. Naturally no one brought a calculator down to the lab with us, and so one of them had to run upstairs and get one. But once that was solved, it became painfully obvious that one of my colleagues has only a very vague notion of how the metric system works. She's a better mathematician and fluid dynamicist than I am in many ways, but yet she didn't really know what the prefixes centi- and milli- meant. How is this possible?
For my part, I sort of just sat back and observed. I did end up releasing a couple of BBs at the end so that two other people could time them, and I provided the conversion from volume measure in liters to volume measured in cubic centimeters, but for me, the experiment truly did morph into watching six mathematicians try to drop BBs into a column of water, and wondering how much more smoothly things would have gone if there were only say two of us working together.
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