Blind men

Safe operation for many years does not prove that a reaction will not run away. Unknown to the operators, the plant may be close to the conditions under which it becomes unstable, and a slight change in pressure, temperature, or concentration, too small to cause concern, may take it over the brink. The operators are blind men walking along the edge of a precipice, as the following incidents illustrate. 

A classic example of this filtering concept is the fahle of the four blind men who encounter an elephant as they walk down the road together. Each blind man encounters a different part of the elephant and tries to communicate to his associates what he has found. The first man touches the trunk and believes they have met a boa constrictor. The second man grabs the tail and thinks it is a rope. A third who has encountered a leg begins to argue saying that both of his friends are wrong and... 

The problem was that a theory is formed in each discipline, based on their limited experimentation and interpretation. This method is analogous to a group of blind men who are allowed to feel and touch different body parts of an elephant and each comes up with a description of how an elephant as a whole should look like. This is to say that the description offered by each blind man may not be completely untrue but it cannot be used to describe an elephant as a whole. Inasmuch as the experimental observation made by each discipline comes from the same material no theory will be complete unless it can explain at least qualitatively all the experimental facts. These shortcomings led physicists to talk only about the quasi-free electrons and completely ignore the possible existence of covalent... 

Remember 0.1 The elephant at left is used to identify important concepts for each chapter. It is intended to remind the student of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. 

Impedance spectroscopy is a complicated area of research that has been subject to significant controversy. As we begin a study of this subject it is well to remember the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant. American poet John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) based the following poem on the fable. ... 

The logo for the 2004 International Symposium on Impedance Spectroscopy, shown in Figure 1, was intended to evoke the lessons of the blind men and the elephant. The multiple loops resemble the Nyquist plots obtained in some cases for the impedance of corroding systems influenced by formation of surface films. The low-frequency inductive loop was deformed to evoke the image of the elephant s trunk, and the capacitive loops resemble the head and body of the elephant. 

Bodenheimer S, Winter JSD, Faimaii C. Diurnal rhythms of serum gonadotropins, testosterone, estradiol and cortisol in blind men. J Clin Endocrinol Metab 1973 37 472-5. 

The complexities of the process are enhanced by the variety of choices for classifying the parameters involved. Figure 1.34 shows five different approaches that could be used to partition the same set of process and tool parameters. A variation on the classic blind men describing an elephant (Figure 1.35) could be used to illustrate how the choice of the aspect paradigm changes the vocabulary used for parameter partitioning of CMP. 

Figure 1.35 Variation of the classic blind men describing an elephant for CMP.

The situation was in many ways analogous to the well-known South Asian fable of the blind men exploring the elephant. The "truth" of... 

The first- and second-generation pioneers were much like these blind men of Indostan. They defined supply chain processes based on their experiences. However, they were blind. Each only saw his own function and set of experiences. These were adopted and passed on as best practices. As we have discussed in this book, much has changed, ft is now time to question the status quo. Many of these process definitions are inadequate. 

Precipitation and dissolution reactions at mineral surfaces are quite complex because both the surface structure and the reaction mechanisms change as a function of the driving force for the reaction. A number of conceptual and quantitative models capture one or another aspect of the growth and/ or dissolution process but, like the blind men and elephant proverb, each model explains only selected aspects of these processes so we lack an overall picture of the beast. The point of this section is to caution the reader against over-interpreting any of these models. 

Go K, Carroll JM (2004) The blind men and the elephant views of scenario-based system... 

If we return to the fable of the blind men and the elephant, we can hope that the teleo-analyst would be able to work out the nature of the beast simply by gathering the separate reports from the blind men and putting the pieces of the jigsaw together. A specific... 

Tossell (1993a) studied F-bearing species in aluminosilicate glasses and tentatively identified a five coordinate species, with three F and three O bonded to Al, whose spectral parameters were consistent with a species seen in F and Al NMR. The methods used were rather crude (LORG with modest basis sets), but the basic idea was to constrain the local structure of the species using a number of different experimental properties, basically a blind men and el ephant approach to the problem. 

Jensen, D.S., Kanyal, S.S., Madaan, N., Hancock, J.M., Dadson, A.E., Vail, M.A., Vanfleet, R. et al. 2013. Multi-instrument characterization of the surfaces and materials in microfabricated, carbon nanotube-templated thin layer chromatography plates. An analogy to The Blind Men and the Elephant , Surf. Interface Anal., 45 1273-1282. 

John Godfrey Saxe, Six Blind Men from Indostan ... 

The following paragraphs describe three main groups of theories of the glass transition (1, 72) free-volume theory, kinetic theory, and thermodynamic theory. Although these three theories may at first appear to be as different as the proverbial three blind men s description of an elephant, they really examine three aspects of the same phenomenon and can be successfully unified, if only in a qualitative way. 

Professor Mark Orazem compares the complexity of testing batteries with the tale in which blind men tonch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, then compares notes, only to disagree at the end. Even for a sighted man, battery diagnostics is complex because no single measurement can quantify the state of health of a battery on the fly. 

Characterization of interfaces. The characterization of multicomponent interfacial assemblies, in which structural details on the length scale of angstroms or nanometers determine device function, can be a formidable task. Often in these cases a complete picture of the structure and chemistry of the interface must come from the application of several complementary techniques, in much the same way as a complete description of an elephant requires complementary data from several blind men. 

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