PHY.2:1 - Problem frame

Use this pattern when you want to understand or investigate a physical situation through another arrangement, and the needed analogue must be built or changed. You may know the target’s laws but need an arrangement that makes their consequences accessible. Or you may be exploring an unresolved mechanism and need to construct a physical possibility that produces a consequence worth pursuing.

Here the target is the situation about which you want to learn. The source is the physical arrangement whose behavior supplies the analogy. The source may first be a thought construction: interacting bodies, material, fields or devices whose behavior can be reasoned about. It can then be expressed mathematically, simulated or built, according to the contribution the work needs.

Start with one target behavior and ask what physical interaction could produce it in a source. If two target parts affect one another, for example, ask what connection in the proposed source transmits that influence. The first result is a source construction, a consequence obtained from it, and an account of what that consequence permits you to infer or try in the target.

You need the relevant physical laws or someone able to supply them, together with the mathematical or qualitative reasoning required by the proposed construction. A ready analogue with a sufficient explanation of its use can be used directly. PHY.1 helps when the remaining difficulty is constructing conditions for a change of scale. C.29.1 helps when the physical constructions are already available and the unresolved work is the correspondence between their mathematical descriptions.