Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1995) | Hacker News Reader

Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1995)

amasci.com

14 pointsTomte6 comments

This is very interesting. I read some, skimmed some, and saved the doc.

But I wish the author had a section that attempted to explain electricity in a simple, yet accurate way. He complains about the problems that prevent it from being understood, but never tries to explain it correctly.

Fair enough for him to make that choice, but I'd much rather read a correct explanation than a list of why all the other explanations are flawed.

bingo. i read about 5 paragraphs before i started scrolling rapidly, until I realized that this entire page was a litany of wrong-ness, an ode to fuck-ups, a waste of my time.

please please for the love of anything decent and good in this world: TEACH US ABOUT ELECTRICITY!

it's ok if it's only based upon the "current understanding" of it... just give us an update as to the canonical way to describe "electrical phenomena" (er how should we refer to this subject?)

Heh.

The very first line says that THIS IS 1989 RAW UNEDITED NOTES.

http://amasci.com/ele-edu.html is the large collection of finished articles.

http://amasci.com/miscon/whatis.html

You're reading my raw notes from pre-internet days.

Please stop!

Try my main article index, http://amasci.com/ele-edu.html

> Fair enough for him to make that choice

No, it's just that someone has found a deep link to my buried page of raw notes from 1989. I guess I should hide it better.

But from there the finished articles link is in the SEE ALSO, and also in the top edge nav bar.

MAIN INDEX: Articles Electricity http://amasci.com/ele-edu.html

Electricity FAQ: http://amasci.com/elect/elefaq.html

INDEX: Electricity Misconceptions http://amasci.com/miscon/elect.html

"We use "lies to children" to avoid complicated explanations, but then we're never up-front with older high-school students about the misconceptions they probably acquired in grades K-6."

This pretty sums most of the "science" textbooks my daughter used. I self-learned about electricity concepts from a book using closed hydraulic system analogy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_analogy)

I'm an EE now :-)

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