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Comment by wycy | Hacker News Reader

It’s really strange reading the words of such an intelligent person beginning to understand something back then that is so fundamental today that even laypeople understand it more scientifically. Really weird, but really cool to get a peek back into a scientific mind in the 1700s.

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> even laypeople understand it more scientifically

Laypeople use more scientific-sounding words, sure, but what more scientific way is there to understand something than to have discovered it yourself through experiment?

Experimentation brings knowledge, not understanding.

Franklin did not understand electricity, but merely observed it.

It wasn't until we discovered the electron proper and Maxwell did his work that we-- anyone-- understood electricity.

Understanding comes from scientific and academic rigor after the discovery.

Or just separately from, like Higgs understanding and theorising a boson years before it was actually 'discovered'/detected experimentally.

> It wasn't until we discovered the electron proper

I’d even say that we don’t yet fully understand the electron!

Along similar lines, I recently learned about an early nuclear physics textbook written by George Gamow. The first edition came out in 1931, and the preface of the second edition in 1937 describes how the book had to be completely written because the state of knowledge had changed so radically in those few years -- most notably, by the discovery of the neutron and of induced radioactivity.

It's fun to think about a time when this stuff that we now take for granted as basic physics was not just new and poorly understood, but the forefront of knowledge was advancing so rapidly.

I haven't been able to find an online copy of the 1931 edition, but the 1937 edition is called Structure of Atomic Nuclei and Nuclear Transformations, and it's available through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.501245

D'oh -- I meant to say "the book had to be completely rewritten" but it's too late to edit my comment.

I often prefer the original language of discovery. My favorite is the term accumulator compared to battery.

That is a much better term, battery: inconsequential detail on how it is constructed. accumulator: what it does.

Using the word “accumulator” wouldn’t be enough to differentiate batteries from capacitors, inductors, etc. which are also accumulators.

In system design that distinction may not matter.

Seems like capacitors, inductors and batteries differ only quantitively in their response curves, not in qualitatively? As in they all do different things to the circuit on the voltage, amperage and time axis? We would need separate words for them, but accumulators seems like a decent umbrella.

> inductors, etc. which are also accumulators.

In what sense do inductors accumulate?

Batteries and capacitors accumulate (i.e. integrate) current.

Inductors differentiate current: v = L di/dt means you get voltage out of current changes.

Inductors accumulate a magnetic field.

The main way that inductors function is by storing energy in a magnetic field, exactly analogous to the way capacitors store energy in an electric field.

I think this might be why accumulate is a good term. If one needed an accumulator that regulated voltage an inductor might work.

Warning I barely know what I'm talking about.

If you apply a constant current to a capacitor, the voltage across the capacitor will increase linearly as the capacitor stores energy in the electric field.

If you apply a constant voltage to an inductor, the current through the inductor will increase linearly as the inductor stores energy in the magnetic field.

Perhaps part of why the intuition can break down is that in real life, inductors tend to be much "leakier" energy storage devices than capacitors. If you store some energy in an inductor and then change the voltage across it to zero (practically: short its terminals together), in theory a perfect inductor will maintain a constant current forever and the energy stored does not change. In practice inductors (with an exception for things like superconducting magnets) are made from wire that has a resistance, and so the current in a real shorted inductor will eventually decay to zero. This means that in practical terms inductors are mostly only useful for short term energy storage. On the other hand, real-life insulating materials (like air, vacuum, or Teflon) can can be pretty close to perfect insulators allowing real capacitors to store energy more or less indefinitely... certainly on timescales of years.

The voltage an inductor creates will restore the current. It's storage.

And while a capacitor's voltage is the integral of current, a battery's voltage isn't.

I like battery. A battery is a group of (one or more) (electrolytic|electrochemical|galvanic) cells. Like pile it is a collective noun.

In German we use “Akku” which is short for “Akkumulator” for rechargeable batteries.

Or ‘pile’ in French, which is homonym for ‘stack’ because a battery is a stack of alternating materials.

interestingly "accu" in french is also used, but only for rechargeable batteries.

same in german "Akku" can re-charge

Is that official? In spanish, decades ago, the word for battery was "Pila"

"Pila" is a heap of countable physical units, either stacked or disordered. But pila is commonly a fixture for liquids, like septic tank is pila séptica

And batteries were mostly lead-acid. Hence, a pile for/of acid.

I was curious and tried to find out what word Volta used when publishing his discovery, and it looks like he just used "batterie" in his letter (written in French) to the Royal Society: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1800.001...

I was unable to find out who coined "Voltaic pile" after a few minutes of Googling.

Indeed! I love reading Benjamin Franklin for exaclty that. If you haven't read it, Walter Isaacson's biography on Franklin is absolutely fascinating. Brilliant, hilarious, driven, and wildly accomplished. The dude was (IMHO) one of the most interesting humans to have ever lived. Highly recommend.

This was how the 18th Century worked. In the 19th Century mathematical language became rigorous and formal, better able to handle more complex constructions accurately, but harder for lay people to learn, as it became a new language.

Well... going by the Fermi biography and the first few chapters of The Idea Factory (about Bell Labs) I would think this is what it always sounds like in the early stages of humans discovering a new part of nature.

It's just that our most recent theories have been so rich that we have happened to discover many things theoretically before we find them in real life. (Theory has preceded practice in recent decades, rather than the other way around which is historically more common.) I'm not sure this will always be so, it might be a temporary leap.

TBH that's how I feel trying to intuitively understand and remember the various colors of quarks and their interactions.

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