Thursday, October 15, 2009

The Stories of Problems, and visuals

While visualizability is far from a necessary component in a physical system, I still find fictional visualizations beneficial to working problems. I imagine energy as a sinusoidal beam, heat as a cloud of these beams, and electron probabilities as a static mist. I think it helps me to create a narrative of the events, which can make arranging appropriate questions to ask myself easier in the mental array of problem solving techniques. I have recently started developing a visualization for circuits by using water pipes. Except, not. I imagine they're large, already filled pipes that require motors to both pull and push the water, because the fluid is just that dense; or, I try to think of it as a steam like substance under pressure, but so high in mass that it's very stubborn to move, so it just needs two motors. I try to avoid thinking about liquid water, because water is blue, and I imagine that electrons are blue, so I'm trying to keep the visual for the flow of positive charge separate from the visual of electrons that I use, say, when comparing electronegativities, because their stories are different. Maybe something more "Yellow"-like

I highly recommend it. Even if the visualizations are somewhat false, I've found them to be helpful in the problem-solving area.

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