Art of Electronics 3rd Edition more famous than Feynman's Lectures on physics

Naturally. Electronics is more fun than physics.

Not entirely. Dr Feyman also played bongo drums, and clips of that have definitely had air-time - I've seen him on TV (as well as in real life) and I've never seen either Paul Horowitz or Winfield Hill.

A Nobel Prize in Physics is a great attention-getting device.

Easier too. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Physics generously allows, after a few years, engineering to play with our toys. The transistor, for instance. Superconductors.

Smile nicely, you'll get quantum dots soon!

As a man who loves both, I will say the Feynman lecture's were more expensive. (It's all free at Caltech now, so I'm guessing sales are down. Awesome book, makes for nice night time reading, for me at least.)

(And I was just hawking AoE3 on some physics site so I'm sure that's led to a big bump in sales. :^)

George H.

Exactly. You do the grunt work, we have the fun and profit.

If you need something to work on, a room temp superconductor would be fine.

The transistor? Really? I believe that was an invention specifically invented by a commercial outfit to be "engineered" as quickly as practical into commercial gear. Im sure Bell Labs does lots of pi-in-the-sky stuff like Josephson junctions that were more researchy than engineered. But they expected the transistor to be out and about very shortly.

NOT!! The Feynman Lecture books have been out for decades, and everybody already has their copy(s). I'm sure they outsold AoE by many orders of magnitude.

I have no idea, but I would not be surprised at all if all editions of AoE outsold the Feynman Lectures.. WAG there are 10 EE's for each physicist.

George H.

Yes, really. The (bipolar) transistor was not just invented, it was discovered in an apparatus that was expected to be a test sample for a field effect transistor investigation.

John Bardeen (two Nobel physics prizes, Ph. D Math Physics, 1936, Princeton), W. Shockley (Ph. D Physics 1936, MIT), and W. H. Brattain (Ph.D physics, 1929, U. Minn) are generally credited with the discovery.

I remember some researchers 20 years ago at my university doing computational physics on something they called quantum dots. They sounded like completely theoretical stuff that nobody would need anywhere.

Now you can actually get quantum dots (see plasmachem.com) and Samsung published QD-based television.

About the subject: my copies of AoEs are on lab desks, Feynman lectures seem to have found home in the bookshelf.

- mikko

The point is they weren't doing research into the nature of solid state physics as much at directly developing a transistor to use in applications. In other words, they weren't doing physics, they were doing ENGINEERING.

Sorry; science is about knowledge and understanding. Not product. They were looking for the reason field effect transistors didn't work. They got what they wanted, which was ... knowledge and understanding.

I dare to say that in most cases physics came *after* the invention, not before.

Best regards, Piotr

So again, physics didn't help, the discovery was possible despite of physics. :-)

All the early valve stuff predates physics invented to explain it, too.

Best regards, Piotr

Engineers were building roads and temples and ships and aqueducts and clocks before the decimal point was invented. Physics is just one tool that we use. Most of modern electronics was invented by tinkerers. Physics helped explain things after amateurs got them to work. Engineers have probably inspired physicists more than the other way around; engineers build things that physicists analyze. Then the math helps make it better.

The bipolar transistor was invented by physicists, but it was a mistake. They were trying to make a jfet. The vacuum triode was invented by a guy who absolutely didn't understand how it worked.

The maser was an outright think-about-the-physics discovery... which Einstein and other authorities had declared to be impossible.

Right. Millions of crazy tinkerers are better at discovering things than a few PhDs.

Of course, most of the low-hanging fruit was stumbeled on long ago.

Physics and engineering are different.

So I guess there is no such thing as Engineering??? All research is looking for "knowledge". That doesn't make it Physics.

Odd logic, there; lots of discoveries open up new knowledge, that's the productive aspect of science. Physics was both a midwife, and the helpless newborn.

Engineering only started after the physicists made up equations that sorta worked. The newborn had to at least get to adolescence before being put to work.