Excessive Use of Math?

[BadOnion]

I think they are pushing it with how much math seems necessary to run this ship. I can see breaking the code, but one you get in, shouldn't the computer take care of the math for you? That's what they are for. Even if he needs to solve equations, it would be more likely they would use a computer rather than a chalkboard.

[General Jumper One]

there is only so much a really old computer with a different language, and probably different math can do

[k1037]

Rush is trying to figure out how exactly Destiny decides on the jump timer. He's found a ton of variables involved, and that problem Chloe solved was apparently the formula (or part of the formula) which determines that. Now that he has a better idea of how Destiny calculates the timer, he has a better idea of what buttons/settings to nudge to figure it out.

I'm guessing there isn't a straight-up "set timer to xxx minutes" button, or at least he hasn't found it yet.

[BadOnion]

And poor earth people thought setting the clock on a VCR was too difficult.

[Shadow_7]

It is when you have to reset it every four hours because your power company runs a variant of windows. j/k

Given that travel in space (3D) involves a number of vectors, there's still a lot of math involved. At least one more dimension that us who travel via car have to deal with. It's not a train that only controls Go and Stop. If they control that much. And not quite a bus either since they have up and down and left and right. Pitch, Yaw, Roll, Thrust, ......... And it's not quite star trek level of tech. Computer plot a course to that pretty dot. Engage...

[Eternal Density]

Computers are good at number-crunching. What Rush is doing is a lot higher level, it seems.

[tomstone]

First off, even on Icarus Rush prefered to work on a Chalkboard rather then on a Computer. Thats just Rush.

Also I am not sure if its all that a good idea to temper with the timer. The Destiny surely has good reasons which it has to consider for the timer. So considering that Destinys Timer depends on its System Status, playing around with those could screw up the Autopilot or at best make the others more suspicous about the changes that they are not supposed to be able to control.

[pipi]

Well to be really geeky with the case of figuring out the jump time, Rush may have access to a button that says something like 'go to next point' or stop/start; very basic stuff, but he does not have access to the source code or at least he does not know how to read it. So he's trying to derive his own formula. And once he has the formula used to calculate the next jump point, he can sit back and analyse the purpose of each jump and whether there is a pattern which would help to explain Destiny's mission.

I think he's trying to find or confirm Destiny's mission (on auto pilot), instead of just stopping the ship and turning back, which he probably could have done.

[iolanda]

Rush might like the blackboards more than other media, but imho the way it is shown is just not realistic considering the stuff he writes on the walls. But I buy that they use all those formulas just because they look cool and scientific.
My problem is that they look awfully lot like stuff you find in every theoretical physics and advanced physic textbooks. And equations like those aren't just solvable by hand when it comes to real problems as well as those results won't be really helpful.

So Rush is just calculating something. Yeah, I know it looks cool, but I just don't buy it.

[CrÃonnacht]

Frankly, it was just a lot of trivial mathematics and physics. At least trivial in the sense that every first or second year undergraduate physics student is well aware of how to handle that. The computations and the abstract connections that you might expect being part of a complex system such as the Destinys', would be on a wholly different level of sophistication.

Anyone with just a decent B.Sc. in Mathematics could come up with more realistic writings for those walls.

[webxro]

And the thing Cloe "solved" , i need to get a better picture but that looked like a integral

[garhkal]

Neither was it 'realistic; in the cop show Numbers. BUT it was sure cool!

[Sami_]

It did strike me as pretty ridiculous that a ships timer required walls of mathematical equations to figure out.

Seemed to me like they (the writers) just thought it would be cool to have some mathematical crap on the wall without much logic as to why.

[CrÃonnacht]

It did strike me as pretty ridiculous that a ships timer required walls of mathematical equations to figure out.

Rush appears to be trying to understand the underlying system, which is probably of a complexity way beyond his understanding. However, a mathematical approach can illuminate a pathway to a more profound understanding of the inner workings of the ship's decision making algorithms. It makes sense to invoke a lot of modern mathematics to unfold the system's architecture for further study.

What I have (sort of) a problem with is that the writers didn't make any effort at all to look for mathematics beyond first-year calculus.

[Phenom]

The maths on the chalkboard did its job. It could have been code for Angry Birds on the Iphone for all I know but it looked cool and like some sort of really hard equation or something.