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Comment by alabastervlog | Hacker News Reader

On a whim, I bought a book called There Are No Electrons at a used book store, some years ago.

The idea of the book is that we spend lots of time teaching students various incorrect and inconsistent models for how electricity works, that also don’t optimally build intuition for working with the stuff.

The book’s remedy is to say “forget all that: here’s a wrong model that is good at building intuition for working with electricity, and if you’re not planning to go for a physics PhD, that’s much better for you than the other wrong models”

I don’t know enough about electricity to evaluate whether this was a good idea or well executed, but it’s an interesting approach.

https://goodreads.com/book/show/304551.There_Are_No_Electron...

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Could you give a gist of such a wrong model?

If that's the book I am thinking of everything an analogy with little aliens called greenies that bounce on trampolines.

I couldn't get through it. I got to just past the holes part.

It is written well, so might be worth a shot.

Angry pixies.

The classical model of an atom with circulating dots representing electrons. I believe those dots must be more like waves.

Or the plum pudding thing. Oh, and phlogiston.

“There is no X” is an interesting trope. I’ve heard it with Fish and Trees as well.

Would these not exist due to taxonomic reasons (trees are just big plants, fish are too many things to be one thing) or for other reasons?

Trees are also too many things to be one thing.

https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th... crops up on HN periodically.

    “Trees” are not a coherent phylogenetic category. On the
    evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly
    interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not
    trees. This means that, for instance, either:

    - The common ancestor of a maple and a mulberry tree was
      not a tree.
    - The common ancestor of a stinging nettle and a
      strawberry plant was a tree.
    - And this is true for most trees or non-trees that you
      can think of.

And it’s not just ancestors! One thing that blew me away after moving from Finland to Germany was that while willows in Finland are predominantly shrubs or bushes, and maples are trees, in Germany willows grow to be trees, but maples mostly stay as vines.

There's a book: "Why Fish Don't Exist" which is pretty good. Evolutionary, my understanding is that things are usually named after their ancestry (phylogenetically?), while fish are basically... "have fish shape and is in water" which becomes awkward. Lungfish and coelacanths are a lot closely related to humans than to salmon.

I do embedded stuff and spend a lot of time looking at electric signals.

Attitude I have about knowing stuff is asking if I can use it predicatively or for design. I feel that for most attempts at explaining how electricity actually works the answer is no. And the amount of torment I'd have to subject my brain to order to make that a yes is higher than I'd like.

At the end of the day, every model is "wrong" to some extent

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