Look at it like a refactoring. Sometimes it is desirable to stop and reorganize a bit. The fact that there is a good reason for using both pi and tau may not be immediately obvious to some people, so they tell us about it. I for example, would never catch on to what tau is, and why it is useful without this. Now that I read it however, I can understand it well. Further, I have gone back and re-examined some things I have been learning lately that contain major sin and cos components. Suddenly they make much more sense to me -- using Tau gives me an intuitive understanding of how cos and sin are related.
To put it another way: If I, and other willing but not genius types, can't understand the results of scientists "finding and confirming important things" why should they do it in the first place? [Edit:] I mean can't understand in a way for use in engineering and other practical ways.
A final note: there is a strong resistance in the math, science, and engineering communities to the idea of "lets look at what we know and reformulate it in a consistent way". They think it is intuitive as it is, even tho there may be ways that people can learn it faster and to as deep of an understanding if a different formulation is used. This results in a lot of stupidity in the world like teaching physics in the order it was discovered, rather than some order building on concepts, or teaching physics by expressing velocity as a fundamental concept instead of as a derivative of something else.
To put it another way: If I, and other willing but not genius types, can't understand the results of scientists "finding and confirming important things" why should they do it in the first place? [Edit:] I mean can't understand in a way for use in engineering and other practical ways.
A final note: there is a strong resistance in the math, science, and engineering communities to the idea of "lets look at what we know and reformulate it in a consistent way". They think it is intuitive as it is, even tho there may be ways that people can learn it faster and to as deep of an understanding if a different formulation is used. This results in a lot of stupidity in the world like teaching physics in the order it was discovered, rather than some order building on concepts, or teaching physics by expressing velocity as a fundamental concept instead of as a derivative of something else.