7 karma · joined February 17, 2015
Something really annoying about this system is that for a non-negligible portion of the parameter space, an adaptive step solver would fail and give up at some point during the integration because the step size converges to zero. This was preventing me from doing large parameter searches. Now, because diffrax makes it easy to specify the step size controller, I first try to solve the system with a PID step size control, and if this fails, I rerun it with small fixed steps, which is slower but always goes through the end. This guarantees that I will always get a complete solution, and that it will still be fast in 95% of cases, which is really a huge improvement.
Let's say that you want to convert `2 min` into seconds. You know that `1 min = 60 s` is true. Dividing this equation by `1 min` on both sides is allowed and brings `1 = (60 s) / (1 min)`. This shows that if we multiply any value in minutes by `(60 s) / (1 min)`, we are not actually changing the value, because this is equivalent to multiplying it by 1. Therefore, `2 min = 2 min * 1 = 2 min * (60 s) / (1 min) = 2 * 60 s * (1 min) / (1 min) = 120 s`. We didn't change the value because we multiplied it by 1, and we didn't change its dimensionality ("type") because we multiplied it by a dimensionless number. We just moved around a dimensionless factor of 60, from the unit to the numerical value.
I think that you misremember, or didn't realize that to convert minutes into seconds, you were not multiplying by `60 s` but by `(60 s) / (1 min)` which is nothing else than 1.