https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Url changed from http://amasci.com/ele-edu.html.
How transistors really work (1995)
(In the same vein, of hard questions with easy-ish answers once you do the research, but that no one ever answers: why is N-type silicon better performing than P-type, down there at the most fundamental level? And whither the P-channel depletion mode MOSFET?)
I dislike Beaty's writing style and fondness for pedantry (though I concede that clearing the air about definitions is extremely valuable), but his explanations are accessible and they are always correct in ways that few other sources are, and that's amazing.
But it's right there in the grade school textbooks! The only magnetic materials are IRON AND STEEL! PERIOD! (Oh and also the blood in your veins is bright blue like paint. And gravity in space is zero.)
Back in the 1980s I decided to do something about this (via science museum exhibit designs.) Then I discovered the great power of "educational memes," like engineering your own Vaccina viruses which spread all through the textbooks, jumping from author to author and innoculating millions of little kids against the bad information.
But to do this successfully, I'd have to write website articles which 1) correct the misinformation in textbooks, 2) didn't draw attention from powerful critics who would put a stop to all that and, also 3) didn't create even worse mistakes!
My first one was this: http://amasci.com/wing/airfoil.html
This "lifting-force counter-meme" has now spread system-wide. Air doesn't split before the wing, then rejoins behind the wing. Instead the so-called"path-length" or "equal transit-time" explanation is wrong, and actually the air above the wing will greatly out-race the air traveling below. The parcels are split, but then they experience significant "phase shift," so they never re-join again (this as long as lift is being created.)
"Capacitor complaints - Why I never really understood capacitors..." http://amasci.com/emotor/cap1.html
Something of the kind was around here recently. I'd guess most people get resistors easily, and most people know they don't know transistors. But the apparently simple capacitor can weird out with the ideal model.
We don't know transistors because (guess!) WE WERE TAUGHT WRONG! http://amasci.com/amateur/transis.html
Latest news: apparently Shockley had to distort the explanation of the BJT transistor, saying that it was a "current amplifier," because the FET had been invented twenty years earlier, and FETs are obviously voltage-input devices. Since transistors already existed, the early Shockley transistor patents were being rejected by the patent office for "prior art." They thought the latest device was just another crystal triode invention like the FET invented by JE Lilienfeld around 1923.
I would suggest "[Nikola] Tesla's Big Mistake?"[1]. It's never been submitted, and I think single-wire power transmission would be surprising to many. Plus, it's some neat history.
http://web.archive.org/web/20161019214341/www.texzontechnolo...
As a result, Corum's company "Viziv Technologies" has built a thirty-story plastic Tesla-tower out in Texas wilderness, and is now performing Earth-resonance experiments down at 12KHz broadcast frequencies. See tower construction slideshow: