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1/n. Why can't Ivor Cummins, @fatemperor, not grasp the complexities of Covid? Why is his reasoning so simplistic?
2/n We have to go back to the 1980s and the education that chemical engineers like myself and Ivor received.
3/n Chemical engineering deals with highly complex systems but, back then, the computational tools we had were limited, to say the least. We relied on (ingenious) graphical techniques to solve problems.
4/n Nonetheless, we were first class "calculators", but the way we were taught, we often didn't really understand quite why the methods we used actually worked.
5/n Our calculations often depended on using "correlations", i.e., experimentally-derived equations relating one parameter (e.g. a Reynolds number) to other parameters (e.g. a heat transfer coefficient or a mass transfer coefficient - coefficients had hid our ignorance.)
6/n These equations allowed us to design processes despite not having any deep understanding of the underlying physical and chemical phenomena
7/n Pragmatism was the name of the game.
8/n It was only when I had to teach these things and I began to work with biologists that I realized that having a traditional engineering education is not necessarily a good background to have if you want to understand complex multi-faceted problems.
9/9 Ivor Cummins, hasn't moved on since the 1980s. For him, "viral triggering" "works" and that's all that matters to him. Whether it has any basis in reality is not the point, at least in the mind of a 1980s engineer like him. Ivor is no scientist.
