No, those physicists didn't invent, they discovered. It was something new, that they wanted insight into, that made new knowledge and understanding. If they had been 'trying to make', there wouldn't have been a discovery, just a trip to the trashcan. They were trying to discover. They did, No mistake, just progress.
That's absolutely not true. Greek and Roman and Egyptian engineers built roads and aqueducts and pyramids with no physics equations; they just experimented and learned. I doubt that the Great Wall of China used any physics equations to build.
Same thing with windmills, bridges, cathedrals, ships.
Edison discovered the diode effect, and De Forest invented the triode, without either having any scientific basis.
I don't think the Wright brothers had any physicists on staff.
A lot of stuff got done without the benefit of equations or theory. The telegraph was working before Heaviside did the math of transmission lines.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
The word you want isn't 'absolutely'. You want to say 'generally', meaning in full generality, without exceptions. I was only referring to transistors.
Transistor operation, with the diode-equation for BE voltage and collector current, was described in Shockley's "The Theory of p-n junctions in Semiconductors and p-n Junction Transistors" Bell System Technical Journal V. 28, July 1949
but there weren't useful devices and products until later.
Eh? Equations are merely one way to express a theory, words are another. There's always a theory when you have ideas about anything. That's what theories ARE.
Perhaps ants get stuff done without having ideas. Persons, not so much.
They were trying to make a device, to use in telephones systems, that would amplify and be more reliable than tubes. They worked for the telephone company.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
It didn't work all that well until the transmission line equations were sorted out.
makes it clear that Wheatstone and Kelvin - as physicists - had a much better idea of how to use the cable than Dr Wildman Whitehouse, who - as a medical doctor - had lots of confidence in his own ideas, which essentially destroyed the first cable.
The cables certainly worked a lot fast once the inductance/capacitance ratios were improved.
John Larkin's faith in under-informed tinkering has lead him astray again.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Physics is extremely useful, but in the early stages of electronics it was more an obstacle than a solution. It simply wasn't predictive enough when the engineering climate allowed most of the major discoveries to happen ("Current flowing through vacuum? Say what?!"). Yet it doesn't stop the physicists (and, especially, the faculties of physics) from claiming that we enjoy the fruit *thanks to* physics, pocketizing achievements of the other guys.
Once the new knowledge has been understood, it gave the mankind a very powerful tool, but more in the field of process optimization, not discoveries. Let's try something more modern: how did physics, with all its deep understanding of solid state phenomena, help Nakamura to *make* a blue LED?
Best regards, Piotr
By pure luck (or the lack thereof, as they built something else than they aimed at). So, then-known physics was of no/much help in that case, but quickly adjusted itself (as it is designed to).
There are many discoveries we have *thanks to* physics (the t quark, the Higgs, black hole mergers) and physics takes all the credits, but I wouldn't dare to say it's the majority.
But it was exactly what they did: try to build a JFET.
Best regards, Piotr
But the words need to be proper and properly connected together. Various theologies are also composed of words, but do they really
*explain* anything? A lot of words, but no content.No, then you merely have hypotheses. A theory is something much more serious, it's a hypothesis with experimental backup. And it needs to be predictive.
Best regards, Piotr
Don't forget steam engines. Carnot was an engineer, but I think physics types want to claim him as one of theirs. To me I don't see much distinction between physics and engineering. I'd describe
99% of what I do as engineering. (Making something work.) Perhaps the only distinction I see is that once it's working the science type will still want to drill down and try to understand it at a deeper level, engineers can be happy to move on.George H.
Carnot was born in 1796. A steam engine was patented in 1606, and Watt's patent was issues 10 years before Carnot was born. Engineers didn't wait for his theories; they enables them.
That's a common pattern: engineers build things and furnish ideas for physicists to explain.
To me I don't
That's what engineers do: make things work. Sometimes using physics equations helps, sometimes other approaches are more efficient.
Engineering isn't science. Lots of academics and other people want it to be, but it's not.
Moving on is good. A real scientist might spend years, or an entire career, on one subject. We can do hundreds or thousands of different designs in one lifetime, and have a lot of fun.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Sure it takes all kinds. Drilling down can be good too. How do you know when to stop trying to make something better? Carnot said here's the ultimate efficiency, Nyquist and Johnson, here's the irreducible amount of noise.. That important for engineer's.
George H.
Between about 1850 and when Thomson really demonstrated the properties of the electron in 1896, lots of people could have built vacuum tube amplifiers. None did.
DeForest did invent the triode, and he completely misunderstood the physics. He thought the gas in the tube made it amplify.
But he started electronics.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
I'm finding it kind of hard to see how a thermionic valve (toob) could possibly fall into the same category as the bipolar transistor in this respect.
Same in medicine. There are lots of drugs that have been around (for decades in some cases) that are effective and produce the desired results, but their mechanism of action is only poorly understood - and sometimes not understood at all! Doesn't stop them doing the job, though.
Same with lightning conductors. Before the physics was fully understood, almost everyone thought that the most important quality for a lightning conductor was minimal resistance. They couldn't understand how some conductors, despite being highly conductive and possessing the requisite cross section would just 'blow out' at a certain point and destroy a building. It wasn't until the nature of lightning was discovered to be essentially that of *pulsating* DC that the formerly missing consideration of inductance became important. William Preece and Oliver Heaviside practically murdered each other in disagreements over the subject. Fortunately duelling had been abolished in England by that time. ;-)
In medicine, that is slowly changing, as people start to really understand biology. But there is a huge way still to go.
In electronics, most of the accidental discoveries have probably been made by now. But maybe not all.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Is everything in those books still relevant, though?
There was plenty of electron physics available for decades prior to
1907, when DeForest made his tube amplify. Strangely, nobody else did it.In the case of the tube, an non-scientist fiddled around and discovered a thing that worked. The device was based on his theories, which were all wrong.
In the case of the bipolar transistor, it was official scientists who fidddled around and discovered something; they were trying to make a jfet and hadn't anticipated bipolar gain.
The processes were similar.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Some of the big players in the telegraph business denied the concept of inductance.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Well, sure there are orders of magnitudes more electronic engineers then physicists.
Its just a numbers game, as is all of evolution.
-- Kevin Aylward
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