Among the challenges for anyone attempting haute vulgarisation in the exact
sciences, is the following phenomenon, epigrammatically summed-up by Stephen
Hawking:
“Every equation halves the number of readers.”
Now, blogspot.com helpfully supplies realtime stats; so we shall test that proposition experimentally.
This post has been up for twenty minutes now, and … lessee …
by the meter, it is presently enjoying roughly a million pageviews, based upon
the subject-line alone. (Were we to add an actual photograph, it would probably crash the server.)
Let us then add one equation, and re-sample:
2 + 2 = 4
[Update, twenty minutes later] Well,
even that proved too much for most:
viewership has plummeted by half.
(Rather a simple repellent, that; like the storefronts that play classical music to shoo away
the teenagers.)
Let’s try again, with something more substantial:
 |
|
Einstein field equation
|
Whoa -- overkill!
That one knocked out all but a hardy hundred-thousand!
Okay, let’s dial it back:
 |
|
Fresnel formula
|
Aww, c’mon, gang, that’s just trig! But ninety-percent of Web-surfers to
this page have just dropped out, leaving a bare thousand.
Probably just a statistical fluke. Let’s try again:
 |
| Klein-Gordan |
D-d-dang!
Hawking if anything put it too mildly. Now there are only a sturdy hundred viewing this page.
Well, those formulae were all from physics (Hawking's field). Let’s try again, with one from number-theory:
 |
| Riemann zeta function |
Alright, end of experiment. At this moment, there are only a bare ten readers viewing this page.
But these are the readers we want!
~
For many mathy goodies, click here:
[Update] Advice to onanists:
Do not indulge that private vice. It can lead to insanity, and it grows hair on your palms.