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Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

I once read a book called "There Are No Electrons". I'm not sure I'd recommend it, but its approach was interesting: the author reasons that unless you're in grad school studying physics (and perhaps even then), everything you've been taught about electricity is a lie anyway, so the author attempts to present a framework of easier to understand lies intended to make the reader able to better reason about and predict the behavior of electrical systems, than if the reader had only the lies that are usually taught.

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For everyone other than the aforementioned physics grad student, it's a lie. For the physics grad student, it's a mystery.

Turns out, the world is really really complicated.

So it's better to say that our models are simplified, not lies.

All models are wrong, but some are useful. (George Box)

> So it's better to say that our models are simplified, not lies.

To be fair, for most purposes (atoms, molecules, metals) there usually (very-) technically aren't any electrons, just configurations of the relevant quantum fields (eg in the form of electron orbitals) whose asociated conserved quantities would allow them to convert into a certain number of free-flying electron particles if you dumped in enough energy to make up the difference.

You see this a bit more obviously with ('virtual'[0]) photons, where some non-particulate field configurations simply can't be thought of as particles at all (eg attactive electromagnetic forces).

0: https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...

More generally: we have stories that say that "things behave as if they are made of ..." but too many people misread or mishear them and think that the form is "things are made of ..."

There are no quantum fields either, just as there are no atoms. Things (of the right size) behave as if there they were composed of quantum fields (or electrons or atoms), and the less we have to say "... except that ...", the more comfortable we are with the story.

The hydraulic analogy is at least honest!

Solid state physics was my favorite class in college (and it was a senior course that people regularly flunked so not really a beginner-friendly tutorial). It was also very hard, and one of only 2 courses I actually attended while studying because I couldn't just show up for the test and ace it. It was fascinating to finally understand the physics behind circuits I'd been building for years (I'd understood RLC circuits since high school, but transistors, op-amps, diodes, and all that stuff I knew how to use but the "how the fuck does this amplify current?" mystery remained).

Unfortunately I don't remember what book I used. But yeah, this definitely opened my eyes to how electricity works.

If this is the book with "Greenies" in it, i've read that, and it was interesting to read but i don't know that it gave me any better idea of how to build a circuit. I lost all ability to design any circuit when it was explained that transistors work because the places for the charges to go moved, not the charges themselves.

I look at "quantum computer" components and go "what does a grid of wires have to do with 'computing'? And then you realize the big secret - There's regular computers that take the 'output' of the qubits/QC stuff and 'decide' what the results are, since it's all just a blob of probability anyhow...

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