Geek Speak — HabitableZone

Geek Speak » in reply to Yes, by all means, let us return to using quills.

I dont think most people realize what computers and the internet have done for the sciences and engineering
R.L. — (archived)

When I was a grad student I had to design and build an electron-ion spectrometer- it used many plates at different potentials to focus ions and electrons onto detectors...

I used a program called Sim-Ion- I essentially used a mouse to draw my field plates and then assigned them voltages and placed my electrons at their starting positions and assigned them their initial energies and momentum vectors...

I then had it run a simulation of the trajectories of all these particled through complex electrostatic fields, I could tweak the voltages on the plates to get the results I wanted- I could quickly test dozens of modifications... A decade before that would be unimaginable...

that was ~7 years ago...

10 years ago looking up scientific papers related to a topic took a day or so in a library- I would miss MANY of relevent papers due to time constraints...today I sit at my desk in my office and do a quick search, the computer returns 100's of results in a second or so... some from journals I would never have thought to search...

What the internet has done for scientific research cannot be overstated.

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