Dammit, trending small majority not heard of it 🙁
Wanted to use it as a metaphor for a piece. Didn’t realize it was that obscure.
I think I learned it in 8th grade by which time I think STEM kids were already on a separate track. For the curious ones:
I keep forgetting how early STEM forks off from mainstream. In my high school, there were 4 tracks: CS and biology on STEM side (targeting engineering and medicine for college) and commerce and arts for humanities/social science side. I think ~40% was STEM and that was high.
There’s a bunch of “charismatic megascience” stuff that non-STEM people hear about like theory of relativity and e=mc^2 but the 90% of mundane shit STEMmies pick up over 8 years of high school and undergrad is basically alien territory for 2/3 of the population.
I feel like PV = nRT (pronounced pivnert, obviously) comes up in my daily life way more than I would have thought, and it's got to be in that 90% as well
Yeah I don’t think you can casually drop that into a conversation and expect to be understood. But the underlying intuitions should be available to all (balloons, boiling kettles, pressure cookers...)