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"Veritasium" (YT) - "The Big Misconception About Electricity" ?
bsfeechannel:
--- Quote from: penfold on March 25, 2022, 12:01:12 pm ---That's an interesting example, it is also an awful example.
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Analogies are a bitch. But you get the idea.
--- Quote ---Yeah... you may want to update your reading material, maths has changed a fair amount since then.
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That's irrelevant. The point is: math is here to help, not to be in the way.
adx:
first this one...
--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on March 24, 2022, 12:58:38 am ---
--- Quote from: adx on March 19, 2022, 03:36:25 am ---Would it have been doomed to also replicate "until then engineers could only produce boat anchors" had Bardeen not suggested surface states? Was he a 'proper' physicist, or an electrical engineer who went back to do some physics papers - or someone above classification, and the transistor was waiting for him and his particular set of interests?
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John Bardeen had a degree in electrical engineering, but he took all the graduate courses in physics and mathematics that had interested him, and he graduated in five years instead of the usual four.
After that he applied and was accepted to the graduate program in mathematics at Princeton University. Then as a graduate student, Bardeen studied mathematics and physics. Under physicist Eugene Wigner, he ended up writing his thesis on a problem in solid-state physics.
At Harvard University, he worked with to-be Nobel laureates in physics John Hasbrouck van Vleck and Percy Williams Bridgman on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals, and also did some work on level density of nuclei. He received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics.
As you can see, Bardeen was a full fledged physicist and went on to win TWO Nobel Prizes in advanced hacking.
--- Quote ---And again, did physicists not have that same four decades to come up with the transistor?
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Yes. And when the opportunity presented itself, they were prepared for the challenge. Engineers were not.
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That's illogical. If an alien were to read that, they would leave thinking the transistor was invented by a fully qualified electrical engineer, first and foremost. We know it's more complicated than that. I even suggested he was above classification.
--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on March 24, 2022, 12:58:38 am ---
--- Quote ---When analysing that situation, the effect you want to confirm seems lost in the noise and bias, and only one thing shines through (apart from cleverness persistence and teamwork of course): The almighty dollar.
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No surprise, here. Science costs money. That's the whole point of the Nobel Prize.
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No surprise here either. My point wasn't that science costs money, it was that the transistor's development was "being funded by an enormous monopoly" and if you have a problem with engineering overtaking the quaint sensibilities of academic physics, then perhaps you should redirect your complaint to some politician. You won't get any complaints from me.
--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on March 24, 2022, 12:58:38 am ---
--- Quote ---If this thread has shown us anything, it is that most electronics engineering is devoid of any direct use of physics and math,
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This thread has shown that electronics engineering devoid of math and physics reduces to a bunch of stupid misconceptions and dogmas bordering pseudo-science.
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Touché? It can. But this thread has also also shown us that electronics engineering overloaded with theory of math and physics reduces to a bunch of less stupid misconceptions and dogmas bordering on a religion.
At least pseudo-science has a chance of being falsifiable (and in some places it worked).
And you're arguing with fact: Most electronics engineering is devoid of any direct use of physics and math. I might like that more than you but it doesn't change things.
Mathematics is too abstract for engineering, and its educators should be (and I assume are) more aware of that.
adx:
--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on March 25, 2022, 01:37:23 am ---
--- Quote from: penfold on March 24, 2022, 03:45:44 am ---My verbal description remains purely verbal and not at all physical, it just describes a physical object.
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Your DNA is a description of you. But it is a description that can replicate itself and even build an entire you. We can encode your DNA sequence using the letters ACGT. It'll describe you uniquely. It'll be purely verbal, but once decoded to assemble the actual nucleic acids it represents, it'll be an functional polymer.
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It can't replicate itself. It needs the machinery of its own encoding to be present to do so. Chicken / egg oscillator. Arguably it doesn't contain all the information needed to build a (physical) you, because the decoder is encoded by itself. I'm not sure I'm happy with that.
--- Quote ---So, is math the encoding of the "DNA" of the universe? That's what David Hilbert and his program aimed to ascertain until Kurt Gödel screwed it all up.
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I see what you mean, and don't disagree with the question.
bsfeechannel:
--- Quote from: adx on March 26, 2022, 01:42:35 am ---That's illogical. If an alien were to read that, they would leave thinking the transistor was invented by a fully qualified electrical engineer, first and foremost. We know it's more complicated than that. I even suggested he was above classification.
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Bardeen's bio shows clearly that his ability to contribute to the invention of the transistor came from his interest in physics, DESPITE being an engineer. That's the point.
--- Quote ---Touché? It can. But this thread has also also shown us that electronics engineering overloaded with theory of math and physics reduces to a bunch of less stupid misconceptions and dogmas bordering on a religion.
--- End quote ---
If your "alternate view" has been proven to be false over and over again, it is not a dogma, it is a fact.
--- Quote ---At least pseudo-science has a chance of being falsifiable (and in some places it worked).
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It is science that is falsifiable. Pseudo-science is either false or non-falsifiable, therefore an article of faith.
--- Quote ---And you're arguing with fact: Most electronics engineering is devoid of any direct use of physics and math.
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Because you make trivial use of them and, therefore, take them for granted, you think they're not used.
When you measure the voltage of a battery with your voltmeter you are repeating what a physicist first did at some point in the past. This is a simple example of a direct use of physics.
When you employ the concepts of quantization and sampling, or calculations, for your wonderful A/D converter, that's a direct use of math.
--- Quote ---I might like that more than you but it doesn't change things.
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What you don't like is when math and physics really displace you from your comfort zone.
--- Quote ---Mathematics is too abstract for engineering, and its educators should be (and I assume are) more aware of that.
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Engineering is essentially applied math and physics. Students should be more aware of that.
SandyCox:
--- Quote from: adx on March 26, 2022, 01:42:35 am ---Mathematics is too abstract for engineering, and its educators should be (and I assume are) more aware of that.
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"Abstractness" is in they eye of the beholder. My wife is a Mathematician and finds circuit analysis very abstract.
The harder I work at something, the less abstract it becomes. It looks like you missed a lot of the basic electronic engineering principles when you were a student. How did you manage to graduate?
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