[weinzierl]

Packing a punch is not only useful to fix things, but often the best way to get you an answer. Or as my control theory professor used to say:

If you want to know how an unknown system reacts, first thing you do is to hit it hard.

What he meant was that applying the Heaviside function to the inputs of a system to determine the step response [1] is one of the first things we should do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_response

[TeMPOraL]

I remember that thinking from control theory classes, but I thought you use a Dirac delta as a hard shove.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_response

(Actually, our control classes told us to do both to get a basic view of a system.)