See subject.
Assuming someone had such a big blackboard and felt it was pedagogically necessary they could dragoon some students, I suppose.
Does this ever happen in real life?
I remember one of the math classrooms at my college had some huge blackboards, but they were divided into two sections. The top section would pull down like a window pane and when the teacher filled that up he’d push it up revealing the lower section.
u/p tells about electromagnetic radiation… they are like resistance and for electricity ( anyway the ratio determines speed of light, and also “AC impedance” )
M. and E. are the fields, magnetic and electric…
W( Candelabra) usually represents probability or wave function ?
lower left says “east” and “equator” suggesting it is the earth… or something.
Not sure, but WAG is it calculating EMP ? From an aerial nuclear bomb, there is a pulse of EM down to the surface ?
Ok, more peacefully, satellite transmission footprints ?
Requiring ladders to access the top of a blackboard seems really silly. Large classrooms often have double- or triple-hung sliding blackboards as described above. I’ve never seen anything like the one in the photo.
The equations and drawings look real to me. They seem describe Newtonian motion in three dimensions. It’s been years since I looked at this and the equations may be somewhat made up.
The letters with dots on top indicate derivatives with respect to time. It’s common practice to use double dots to indicate a second derivative with respect to time, but I see that the blackboard simply writes it out as d[sup]2[/sup]x/dt[sup]2[/sup] instead of putting a double dot over it.
You’ve got coordinate transformation by rotation in the lower right written out in algebraic form instead of being done in matrix notation.
the lower-case omegas (they look like curly "w"s) are usually used for rates of angular change. At a glance, the whole thing loks like they’[re doing orbital calculations. The "mu"s are used in electromagnetic calculations (in MKS units), so it could be orbital theory for elementary particles. But mu was also used as a symbol for reduced mass in planetary calculations. Without diging into it, I’d give the edge to gravitational orbital calculations.
It’s an old Life image, and they covered the Space Race in some detail. There’s absolutely no need to have six engineers crawling on ladders around a greenboard – it loks like a setup for the Life photographer at some NASA facility, or something.
And doesn’t all that math look rather elementary? It’s not that it’s wrong, but simplified, using nothing more complex than simple derivatives and algebra and the commoner trigonometric functions. It looks more like the math you’d do on a scrap of paper than the math you’d get a group of actual professionals to puzzle over.
(What’s odd to me is what’s by the man on the stage-right ladder’s left hand: They define the Newtonian notation for a second derivative to be a derivative with respect to tau, which is itself defined as some (constant?) kappa times t minus t[sub]0[/sub] (a scaled relative time?), and so they have to use the Leibniz notation to take the second derivative with regards to t a bit lower, in a partially obscured equation. What is all that about?)
nvm
Yeah, those definitely look like orbital calculations - you have an equation for orbital frequency in terms of “a” which is the conventional letter for “semi major axis” and it looks like Mean anomaly - Wikipedia, eccentric anomaly and true anomaly are up there too.
I recall having seen this picture recently in a Wikipedia article, IIRC it was indeed taken at NASA or some affiliated organization. Giant blackboards with a number of movable windows make perfect sense in a big lecture hall.
However, the way this particular blackboard is mounted to the wall looks kind of improvised.
And the picture was probably staged:
I mean, it’s in a parking lot, so… probably not where they did most of their work.
Did I call it?
Nothing to contribute to the discussion, but thank you for that site! I’m going to waste a lot of interesting time there!
Yes!
I would highly recommend not to look at this - very - disturbing picture:
Not everybody gets the good offices.
Yes this is a joke. When I was in school I did more complicated differential equations that took up more board space than this. The problem I solved for our take home final exam took two weeks for me to solve and I was the only brave enough to volunteer going up in front of the class and showing my work. The class actually applauded. God I was quite the nerd. 
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At least that guy died quickly when his capsule crashed. (Assuming he didn’t get slowly incinerated during re-entry first.)
Valentin Bondarenko wasn’t so lucky. He died in a fire in a training capsule exercise on the ground. The description of his barbecued body sounds much like the picture linked above, except he lived like that for another eight hours or so (apparently conscious at least some of that time).
Story here. (Scroll down about 4 screensful, or search for third occurrence of Bondarenko and start reading there.)
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