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Comment by nyrikki | Hacker News Reader

That video is good for the water like wave explanation that is a very useful lens. If you want a more in-depth explanation, particularly how the field is in the dielectric and the wires/traces are simply the wave guide, this long presentation by Rick Hartley will help move to the next level.

https://www.youtube.com/live/ySuUZEjARPY

The dramatic shift in behavior above the audio frequency range is where the water wave lens starts to fall down IMHO.

I was looking at my brothers memory card from a Cray 1a the other day and that video popped in my head. They had the timing traces snaking through several flat-pack chips legs. No wonder they had to move from parity to Hamming code even with exclusively using differential twisted pairs between modules.

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That one‘s gold too, but for me it was the other way round - needed Hartley to fully grasp Alpha Phoenix.

Understanding waves feels a bit like the bell curve meme for me: you start with the mental water model, and eventually end up with it again.

Or Feynman: you hear him helpfully talk about bouncy rubber balls, then learn a bunch of stuff over the next decade, and randomly listen to the same lecture again, and suddenly all sorts of „aaaah, that’s what he meant“ lightbulbs go off.

I should also clarify something above, Oliver Heaviside did discover the energy flows through the dielectric, most explanations like that video use other lenses to communicate the very real need to consider voltage and current.

The original link side stepped that as to be honest it is to complicated for the intended use case.

All models are wrong, some are useful, and the water wave model is very useful for very real needs.

I personally wasted a lot of time confusing the map for the territory, but yes everyones path will be different. I confused the "electron flow" and water wave model as being absolute ground truth for way longer than I would like to admit.

Watching the Alpha Phoenix video I had a sort of realization that waves (as phenomena in general) are basically nature’s calculator/probes. If nature doesn’t “know” what will happen there’s probably some wave involved to figure it out.

And bias, especially in science and politics travels as a wave through time like a pendulum. Solving these systems, with the resistance measured in human lives, can take many generations.

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