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| "Veritasium" (YT) - "The Big Misconception About Electricity" ? |
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| penfold:
--- Quote from: SandyCox on March 26, 2022, 10:01:33 am --- --- 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. --- End quote --- "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? --- End quote --- Why do you assume anybody else should be like yourself? The more involved I got with circuit analysis, the more abstract it became. The very concept of a square box on paper representing a resistor that in reality has no end of different physical manifestations is something I never questioned until I began relating circuit descriptions to more genuine mathematical entities. To me now, it seems absurd that I never questioned just how insanely abstract a circuit diagram really is, but I guess we all have different views and backgrounds on it. |
| SandyCox:
--- Quote from: penfold on March 26, 2022, 01:00:11 pm ---[ Why do you assume anybody else should be like yourself? The more involved I got with circuit analysis, the more abstract it became. The very concept of a square box on paper representing a resistor that in reality has no end of different physical manifestations is something I never questioned until I began relating circuit descriptions to more genuine mathematical entities. To me now, it seems absurd that I never questioned just how insanely abstract a circuit diagram really is, but I guess we all have different views and backgrounds on it. --- End quote --- I just described my own experience. Abstraction is a good thing. It removes irrelevant information so that we can focus all our attention on the problem at hand. |
| penfold:
--- Quote from: SandyCox on March 26, 2022, 02:15:13 pm ---[...] Abstraction is a good thing. It removes irrelevant information so that we can focus all our attention on the problem at hand. --- End quote --- My apologies if I miss-spoke, I might have misinterpreted your intent there. I absolutely agree with the benefit of abstraction and analogies for analysis. But it is quite a common occurrence on this forum that a (self-teaching) beginner to electronics will pose questions on or seek a purely theoretical route to learning about circuit design and struggling. Similarly amongst early-stage Ph.D. students approaching EEE from mathematics, ACSE, or physics backgrounds, the second it comes to actually build a circuit, develop a test rig, or anything more practical, they struggle. Engineering is fundamentally about actually designing something that'll get built and it does appear that abstraction isn't the main facilitator to that. Being asked "where might I find the non-linear resistors in the Farnell catalogs?", "do you know of a simple circuit that'll convert a current into a voltage?" or "why does this DC amplifier produce a 40MHz sine-wave?" (by embarrassingly intelligent people) is quite telling of the fact that theory and abstraction is not the key, and be quite hampering to beginners. The reverse of that is also true with EEE students struggling so much with ACSE and DSP topics. |
| adx:
I was hoping to do all this justice but haven't had time - plus it's tiring! At first I thought some people had more of less believed what they were taught without really questioning it, but now it is clear to me that they really do believe that they believe it. So I have been trying to see it from those perspectives, because there is some kind of communication difficulty at play (whether or not there is rightness or wrongness). I don't see why my disbelief that j=sqrt(-1) is such a problem for j. It doesn't change the way reactance works. I'll need to read Steinmetz better than a glossing over to see if it provides the claimed "proof", and other things about the meaning of i. |
| adx:
Actually the best I've got is that the solution to x^2+1=0 gives the property of lateralness that lends itself to phasor analysis, such that it allows the 90 degree phase shift to be represented, and uniquely provides the rotation property when the solution is multiplied by itself. But I don't know if that is true, or even necessary. |
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