Directionality of wire

anyone here a scientist? Raise your hand if you are a scientist.

BTW, an engineer is explicitly NOT a scientist.

The two receive fundamentally different educations, right from the get go and throughout their training.

A scientist is trained in theory.

The engineer is trained in LAWS.

Both bits are the same, except a scientist is wired to question the theory, where the engineer is taught that these concepts are scientific law and inviolate.

The scientist is the only one of the two that is correctly trained.

The engineer is literally ~purposely~ mistrained so they won’t try to engineer a solution that is based on guesses. They are specifically taught not to think that way. Trained to ’engineer solutions’, NOT to deal with unknowns....Specifically to not deal with unknowns. I hope that is clear. You should never build a giant bridge, skyscraper, or rocket.. based on guesses and theory. Please and thank you. However, this mentality can and does bite scientific exploration on the ass. Repeatedly. The engineer tends to not understand that they are mistrained, as it rarely creates issue in their lives and they (some of them) can generally bully their way past the seeming roadblocks.

This is why some choose the endeavor of engineering over that of science theory and exploration. A mental mindset orientation thing. Just like all areas of chosen endeavor.

If you think I’m tying to be mean or confuse the issue, please go and ask the head of your local physics department at your local university. Please. You’ll get the same answer all the way up through Harvard, MIT, Max Plank institute, all of them will tell you that there are no laws and there is only theory...and that everything, everything under the sun... is subject to change and modification, if observation and then attempts at correlation/proofing... provide the path. But, importantly, that an inability to prove via extant methodologies... does NOT provide for falsification of the observation, just that no path to yay or nay --yet exists. THAT is science.

Only engineers and technicians get taught the scientific law bit. Nobody else.

So when we get this issue of "not being possible", or "not being real"or "it has to be a bunch of bunk and no one here uses science", you can bet your bottom dollar it is coming from an engineer or a technician, or someone who has no real scientific training at all.

Actually that whole premise is not true. I am an Engineer, aerospace type, Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va, but my curriculum was almost all theoretical propulsion and theoretical fluid dynamics. Statistical Thermodynmics and Indeterminate Structures are also very theoretical as were many other courses. So, it’s not really true, at least in my case and obviously many other cases, that engineers are not trained in theory.

You are right Geoff, it is a oversimplification, and not 100% true. It is a generalization, at best, but it’s aura hangs over the whole engineer vs scientist scenario.

It certainly started the way I speak of, back in Bavaria, in the 1760’s.

But if you give them room for a few to slip through, 100% will take the cheat.

the Germans found a way to get more boots on the ground, when it comes to competence in the sciences, the kind that can build and make.

Not everyone could be a exploring Renaissance man. so they came up with "the law, don’t question it" technique of training, and then they could get good ’makers’ out there, by a factor of 10-50x vs that of the exploring theoretician.

The trick was to do things, make things... with all the science they had discovered. This was a way of achieving that.

Builders, qualified and capable builders and getting it done in a scholastic environment in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonable rate of success..required a revamp of the real scientific method.

The birth of scientific law was and is synonymous with the birth of the societal slot of ’engineer’. Both really came into being in ~1760’s in Bavaria. The rest of the western world witnessed the success of this technique... and copied it.

And the quandary of this forum, were observation is ruled scientifically violating(by some) and therefore invalid, was born from that gestation/change/split in Bavaria.

Come on, give me a break. It's not true at all.

Jea48 8-16-2017
herman, and or Al, (almarg) any thoughts?

Jim (Jea48), thanks for providing the references, and the hypothesis about the possibility of the dielectric having directional properties to some degree, the dielectric being the medium through which the energy of an audio signal is transmitted.

My only thoughts about that hypothesis are general in nature. I note that one of the basic themes in the Cardas writeup on breakin seems to be that breakin involves change from a more uneven state of distribution of stored charge toward a more even state of distribution (as well as a reduction in stored charge). That would seem to me to imply that if anything a cable that is well broken in would be less likely, rather than more likely, to exhibit directional properties, if in fact the hypothesis is correct.

On the other hand, though, one doesn’t have to look far for examples of non-conducting materials that transmit certain forms of electromagnetic energy better in one direction than the other. Blacked out windows on automobiles, for example. And in the realm of electronics, there are of course devices based on semiconductors, namely diodes, that operate by having very low resistance in one direction and very high resistance in the other direction. Although in that case a junction between two different kinds of semiconductors is involved.

Even if the hypothesized phenomenon were to exist to some degree in the case of audio signal transmission, however, as with many explanations that are asserted in marketing literature and elsewhere for audio-related products and tweaks a fundamental problem is that the hypothesis does not lend itself to being analyzed (or measured) in a **quantitative** manner. And as I’ve said in various threads here, in the absence of any sort of quantitative perspective on a claimed explanation, whether or not it has a reasonable possibility of being great enough in degree to be audibly significant is unlikely to be either provable or disprovable with any conclusiveness. That, together with the ease with which extraneous variables can be overlooked when it comes to ascribing a cause to subtle sonic effects that may be perceived, are IMO major reasons why we see so many arguments about such things.

Best regards,
-- Al

P.S: To Analogluvr, thanks very much for the nice words you posted here a few days ago.