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Why are physicists the electronics experts?
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SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: NANDBlog on August 21, 2020, 09:33:27 pm ---Well, thats normal. If you ask an " I=U/R" question, you are not going to get an answer online from an engineer, because he will be busy navigating to a different webpage that is actually interesting. Its not that we dont know the answer, but it is probably just to elementary.

Now, ask the physicist, to recommend an opamp with low offset voltage for battery powered electronics. Or with the previous example, I=U/R is interesting, if you need to do Monte Carlo on the resistor values, the U changes based on the battery voltage, the resistance has to be from the E24 table, cheaper than  cent, and the current has to be kept below the safety limits of a harmonized standard.

Besides, engineering is all about problem solving. If you can google your question, and solve the problem that way, do that.

--- End quote ---

I second this.

Several of us asked what kind of questions the OP was referring to. And apart from the kind of forums they visit, I think this is the key point here.

If you ask a fundamental question about electronics - it could be either pretty advanced, in which case a typical engineer may not be comfortable answering, and a physicist will be better at that - but as I said earlier, you may not understand your own question after they have fully answered ;D . As Dave just mentioned, the whole thread about Kirchhoff's laws was a good example. Is that kind of questions what the OP had in mind (and calls people able to answer them properly "electronics experts")? Frankly as several of us already said, you'd need to ponder what engineering is all about.

Or, it could be a very basic question, as NANDBlog just said, in which case many professional engineers will just pass - they usually have better things to do than teach elementary things to typical students (or hobbyists). So obviously it's not because they are not expert enough in that case, just that they have better things to do. The value of an experienced engineer on an online forum is their experience and practical knowledge, it's not teaching random people very basic things that anyone can find in a textbook.
richard.cs:

--- Quote from: coppice on August 21, 2020, 12:59:25 pm ---I have heard from some UK academics that health and safety plus cost issues means lab work is mostly matlab work these days.

Someone with an electronics degree who has little understanding of basic components is not necessarily a bad thing. Electronics is now a big topic, and every engineer is a specialist of some kind, For example, many careers in electronic engineering can be entirely based on the maths of communications.

--- End quote ---

For this particular university the cause seems to be more related to internal politics.

And yes of course some engineers specialising in comms theory is good and necessary. I am not sure however that a masters in electronics should focus so heavily on it to the detriment of everything else. Or to put it another way, the kind of engineer that my employer requires aligns poorly with many UK university electronics courses, to the extent that when they apply for an electronics engineering position we are starting to count an electronics degree as a possible negative. I don't think our needs are that weird and oddball that this should be the case.

We've also become a bit suspicious of top grades - it seems to correlate heavily with the kind of student who is very good at exam technique and studies very narrowly to optimise academic results at the expense of subject understanding.
Rick Law:

--- Quote from: pidcon on August 22, 2020, 03:11:58 pm ---I would imagine that physicists work in an academia-like environment and would be more open to communicating their ideas and definitely will take the time to explain how things work from their perspective. Maybe the engineer was too busy to write out a long explanation.

--- End quote ---

RE:"...physicists work in an academia-like environment and would be more open to communicating their ideas..."

That would be the ideal, but that is not the real world.  A lot of careers and money are on the line.

Say for example, Dark Energy.  It is the current accepted "standard model".  A lot of money is on the line.  You have to search really hard to find Astrophysicists who openly voice their doubt.  Doing so will pretty much limit your grants and career rather quickly.  You have some "voices in the wilderness" and that is about it.  If your publication submission doesn't agree with the "standard model", good luck getting it published.  It can be done, but certainly not easily.  Should their objection of Dark Energy be proven truth, a lot of "heavy weights" (establishment, including Nobel Laureates) will be handed a good size serving of humble-pies.

But, the world of Physics is changing...

First a quick fact: LHC found the Higgs particle, but absolutely nothing else!  Super Symmetry is now in doubt -- All the SUSY particles we hoped for, no SUSY particles found at all!  Not a one.  Proposals exist to upgrade LHC (14TeV, about 27km ring) to about 8x (110TeV) by adding another ring at about 100km radius - hoping may be we will find some (SUSY and the likes).  Tons on money there for everyone to get a piece of that pie.

The fallout of no SUSY: Physics today is in crisis or in an era of great opportunities.  String Theory have been sucking all the top brains of Theoretical Physics for the last few decades, but it is now in great doubt.  The Standard Model for Particle Physics while works but too much seem like patch-work, is therefore lacking a way to get out of that patch-work construct.

It is now finally the time to call some "standard models" into question.  You can still have a career if you openly question "Standard Model for Particle Physics" or the validity of String Theory today.

EDIT - missed the re:"... ..." in the first line.  Corrected a "could" to a "can" in the last line.
Nominal Animal:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on August 22, 2020, 05:56:24 pm ---But in the context of the thread and of what you said above, it was kind of conveying the idea that most people helping others out on tech forums must just be hobbyists or people who haven't achieved anything much, which was backed by your "I'd say that the overwhelming majority of people answering questions online do so on topics they have as a hobby, not as a day job." sentence.
--- End quote ---
I see.  I definitely didn't intend it that way.  Again, I am horribly bad at expressing non-technical things in English; the non-technical undercurrents escape me, and in my own written output tend to be just noise.

There are a lot of professionals on the net.  I tried to convey a guess that perhaps hobbyists find it difficult to express their questions and problems in a way that attracts the interest of a professional to answer; that many questions instead get answered by other hobbyists.

I am not claiming that those who answer are hobbyists, just wondering aloud that it could be possible that when asking vague, not-very-well formed questions, to get answers from other hobbyists, because professionals find the hardest part is to understand what is the actual problem the asker is trying to solve, or something along such lines.  So, when asking questions about electronics, it perhaps could be that some questions attract answers from hobbyists that happen to be physicists, because a lot of physicists with electronics as hobbies (I know about half a dozen or so) also like to ask and answer questions (the ones I know that have electronics as a hobby happen to also be that way, myself included – and I am aware that I oftentimes seem to have a "teacherly tone" and seem like I know more than I do, as just a hobbyist in electronics, which lead to the attempt at a self-deprecating joke).  And all this assumes that OP's observation is correct, which I am not at all sure about; I think it more likely that it is just confirmation bias, or a complete coincidence.

On a completely different track, human minds are not at all good at discerning if something happens often or not.  We have exceptionally strong perception "filters" or "lenses".   Consider the following attention test:

and you'll understand what I mean: our conscious perception is highly selective.

The scientific principle about repeatable experiments is the best tool I know of of overcoming those.  Practical experience, in the best case, falls into the same category, unless done by rote.  People who have acquired experience on how to keep things working in a dynamic experience have a lot to teach; and electronics, especially electronic design, is a complex subject where nothing is "perfect", and that makes EE experience such valuable to me personally.  So, if you read anything written by me that seems disparaging of EE or practical engineering, let me know so I can fix, because that is an error, categorically.  (I do often wail against people who do not do the work, and produce shoddy work, but even that's not about ability, that's about effort or exploitation.)

I personally like to answer very specific types of questions that also interest me, and in those cases can get quite in-depth even if I have no idea of the actual answer myself beforehand.  Among those questions, and other answers to the ones I've tried to answer, there are roughly three categories: drive-by-statements (that either give a formula, link, or statement) without any reasoning, often basing the answer on authority; other hobbyists (either having solved the same beforehand, found an answer elsewhere, or happen to know the answer, or how to find the answer); and professionals.  It is my feeling, without any actual statistics, only based on my "gut feeling" related to the thousand or two questions I've (tried to) answer on the net, that the middle category, hobbyists, is in the majority.
I do not place much value on that feeling at all, because the questions were on very specific topics.  To me, it is barely enough to speculate on.

So, if anybody felt slighted about any of my statements in this thread, I do apologise: no slight was intended.  I don't see any real way to find out if OP is right or wrong, and it does not really matter enough to more than idly speculate on.
bsfeechannel:

--- Quote from: EEVblog on August 22, 2020, 09:52:30 am ---
--- Quote from: Berni on August 20, 2020, 06:32:14 pm ---
This leads to things like the much debated topic around Dr. Lewin and Kirchhoffs circuit rules.
--- End quote ---

Yes, that was a absolutely classic case of the way an electronics engineer sees things, and how a physicist sees things. In essence both of them were "right".

--- End quote ---

Unfortunately, that's not true.

Tom Lee, that you interviewed on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast, says the following in his book, Planar Microwave Engineering: A Practical Guide to Theory, Measurement, and Circuits, a book that every wannabe microwave engineer should read:

As we noted early in this book, it is important to remember that conventional lumped circuit theory results from appproximating the way the universe behaves (in particular, from setting to zero some terms in Maxwell's equations [i.e. using special cases of those equations], effectively treating the speed of light as infinite). The much vaunted "laws" of Kirchhoff are not really laws at all; they are consequences of making simplifying approximations, and so they ultimately break down.²

² Failure to acknowledge this fact is the source of an infinite variety of false conundrums, many of which are debated ad nauseam on various internet chat sites ("proof that physics is broken" [or that engineers see things different than physicists] and that sort of thing, written by folks who are often wrong but never in doubt).

Chapter 21 "Antennas", p. 688.

The bold letters and quotes between brackets [] are mine.

Tom Lee is an engineer.

.

He published this in 2004.

And that's the whole point of the engineering degree: make you see things the way a physicist sees so that you know exactly what the consequences of your simplifications are. Engineers need to simplify things for practical reasons, but they can't afford to see things in a different way. Engineering is not an amusement park. It is serious business.

So the truth is that some engineers insist that the simplified way the see the world are the fundamentals, get puzzled when it fails and are proud of their ignorance, while a lot of other engineers endeavor to see the world exactly as physicists do, know that their simplifications are prone to break down, and thank the physicists who point that out to them.
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