41 sats \ 3 replies \ @Satosora 28 Oct \ on: Forgotten Genius: A Maverick of Electrical Science BooksAndArticles
I work on boilers and stuff, but I never really understood all the wiring to it.
Those guys are amazing when they look at wiring diagrams and all the colorful wires and are able to make stuff work.
If it was me, I bet the box would explode.
It's like anything else. You pour in enough rounds of practice and you become a wizard.
Speaking from personal experience it's remarkable how rudimentary my understanding was (I thought I knew a lot) from freshman year of EE school to where I got to a few years in the industry.
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I just dont have much of a brain for the electrical stuff.
Probably some truth to that. But you probably also had bad teachers too. All the electrical stuff can be explained in terms of mechanics as well.
In fact one of the key analogies drawn on by the author is how: Heaviside used to make ripples/waves using cloths in these big wash bins. And he discovered that if you tie knots at particular intervals you could influence how the waves developed.
That later influenced his work on distortion free transmission line theory. Adding inductance at intervals mirrors this effect but in electrical circuits.
His work on calculus also has value/import in mechanical systems. My father taught me this:
- In mechanics there is this differential equation: F(net) = k*x + c * v + m * a = k * x + c * (dx/dt) + m * (d²x/dt²)
Where k is the spring constant, c is the damping constant, m is mass and x is position.
It describes forces acting upon a body and combines Newton's second law, hooks law and Stoke's Law for damping (dissipiatoin of energy in the system). The beauty of this type of notation (pioneered by Heaviside) is that it simplifies things into derivatives of x (poistion). The dt terms indicate the rate at which a term varies in time.
- In electrical systems there is this differential equation: V(total) = q/C + R * I + L * (di/dt) = (1/C)q + R*(dq/dt) + L*(d²q/dt²)
Where V is voltage at a given point in space, C is capacitance, R is resistance and L is inductance and q is. It is likewise a combination of multiple physical laws that can be derived from Maxwell's Equations (also pioneered and simplified by Mr. Heaviside). These equations together reveal how fractal and analogous nature is. You can actually apply each of these laws spatially and understand circuit theory, wave propagation, free body diagrams and more.
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