[madaxe_again]

I feel it’s a function of abstraction.

You learned when analogue circuitry was the norm. I learned when digital circuitry was simple enough that you could readily take something apart and understand it.

Now, EE courses often start with cad, simulations, digital electronics, and you end up with people building ziggurats atop an ocean of incomprehension.

It’s exactly the same thing with software.

I don’t scorn people for this, rather I see myself as fortunate for having learned in a time when the more fundamental knowledge was still worth learning - and that’s the rub - for a vast majority, it simply isn’t worth the time or energy to explore the full stack, when there’s so much to learn atop it.

[hilbert42]

"You learned when analogue circuitry was the norm. I learned when digital circuitry..."

What's not taught properly these days is that ALL electronics is analog at the physical/circuit level.

For you digital types that's OSI Model Layer 1 — Physical layer (look it up on Wiki). Nothing in electronics works unless that's working properly—ICs, tunnel diodes, transistors, inductors, resistors, capacitors, cables and antennas are all analog devices at that level. That includes the heart of the most advanced digital ICs. For example, the upper clock speeds in processors are limited by transit times/electron mobility, inter-electrode and stray capacitances, unwanted inductance, etc.—all of which are analog effects and they must be accounted for.

Like it or not, the physical analog world is alive and well! The Noughts & Ones Brigade unfortunately seems to have forgotten that fact.

[vintermann]

> you end up with people building ziggurats atop an ocean of incomprehension.

Everyone does. There's probably a layer below for everyone but the most theoretical physicists. I don't know where the leaks in electronics engineering's abstractions are, but I'm pretty sure they exist.

[madaxe_again]

This is why I went on to study physics - I never was someone who could stop asking “why?”

All it does is provide yet more profound questions.

[hilbert42]

"…I never was someone who could stop asking “why?”"

When a kid of about four I found a pair of WWII headphones and took them to my father who pulled out the iron diaphragm and showed me magnetism at work—somehow some magical force was pulling the diaphragm back into the headphone with seemingly nothing in between. Absolutely fascinated, I wanted to know what this invisible 'magic' was. Many decades later every time I look at my fridge magnets I still ask the same question and I don't believe I'm much closer to the truth!

Sure, there are the simple answers everyone's taught, then there's QFT but even that doesn't tell me exactly what's going on. And why does alpha have the value it does, and why exactly does c = 1/(μ0ε0)^1/2? Not knowing and not being able to figure these questions out is, at times, infuriating.

For me, solace of sorts can be found in engineering—I can build an electronic circuit and end up with a tangible working device. On the way I'll curse my electrons for making so much noise that they sound like ball bearings rattling around in an empty oil drum but I'll eventually calm down and apply Johnson–Nyquist to shut them up (well, a little bit anyway).

[madaxe_again]

Yes, exactly those questions, and others of the family. Things we can describe yet cannot yet explain - and “yet” is doing some heavy lifting there. Perhaps some things cannot be explained from our reference frame.

I got sucked into the infinite perspective vortex from the cosmology angle - a grandmother with a vast collection of pulp sci fi and clear skies over her canal boat. And yes, magnets, what is this devilry and why will nobody tell me how it works?

Upon discovering said imponderables I moved to the woods instead - building infrastructure of all varieties from the ground up, playing with hydropower, that sort of thing - and of course EE gets jammed in all over the place, and when I can get away with something simple and analogue, I do.

I build things because the alternative is spending tracts of time staring into the abyssal fact that explanation is always ultimately internal to the system being explained.

[sdenton4]

Well... https://xkcd.com/435/