Communication
Written by: Tony Harris, December 10, 2015
This certainly must be the age of mass communication. Don’t you think? In 1970 the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar debuted and in a song at the end of the musical, Tim Rice’s lyrics have Judas tease Christ with the lines: “If you’d come today you could have reached a whole nation, Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.” So 45 years ago we thought we lived in the age of mass communication. No cell phones, no internet, no wifi, but we thought we had it all down pat. Makes you wonder what mass communication will mean 45 years from now.
Today I have an app on my I-phone called ‘translate.’ I can talk into it and it will translate my words into lots of different languages. I can scan text of several foreign tongues and it immediately displays it back to me in English. All these things further our ability to communicate.
Science however, is an area that needs work. Physicists, engineers, biologists, chemists and those in the medical profession have devised a language of their own. Many of the fundamental laws of physics are described purely in mathematics, because, quite frankly it is a lot easier. Einstein’s theory of special relativity is described in four papers or E=MC^2. OK I simplify a tad, but not much.
So whereas a scientist can pick up a work of Dickens, read it and at least get something from it, an English student could be more than a little challenged by Lederman’s book describing the Higgs boson particle.
Not fair you say; if you are on the arts side of life, and you’re probably right, but if it makes you feel any better; scientists can confuse each other by talking different languages and need to translate from one dimension to another, one unit of measure to another. All E&I’s amplifiers are rated in terms of the power that they can deliver. However, many of our customers are just interested in the voltage potential that they can develop across given impedance. One of the major challenges we face is communicating with our customers and to understand their requirements in their terms, translate them to our terms, solve the problem and then provide the answer back to them in their terms.
But we are good at it. Try us!
Cheers,
Tony