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

Why does that bother you? You don't like cars or airplanes or toaster ovens?

I don't ignore those issues.

If you want to see some truly hilarious circuit designs, look through The Review of Scientific Instruments. More trimpots than you'd think possible. Physicists and chemists tend to be terrible circuit designers (Phil being a welcome exception.)

We do a lot of first-article testing, and we try to make sure that our production tests verify all the specs and find every likely failure mode. But we have to be pragmatic and sell stuff.

Recent analysies have suggested that about half of published, peer-reviewed scientific research can't be replicated. Most "scientific" papers are wrong.

Around the beginnings of undersea cables, apparently there was one guy who calculated losses naively, decided that it would take so-and-so many horsepower worth of electricity to excite the cable, and....promptly blew the hell out of the thing, somewhere deep underwater. The owners weren't happy.

The guys who actually knew about transmission line theory (which was more or less developed by mid 19th century, but disseminated very slowly into the engineering class, it would seem) took a more conservative approach, and had things operating quite effortlessly.

Tim

I agree, but I think the key word here is "brilliant"; brilliant tinkerers that would have made brilliant PhDs if the social conditions had been right for them.

Vladimir K. Zworykin and John Logie Baird were both tinkerers in TV, yet one went on to get a PhD, developing a TV system that was head and shoulders above the other's in elegance and sophistication.

Larry Harson

Yes, unlike AoE2, which already wasn't when it was released! :^)

(Just kidding, but echoing Win's observation that the programming section went stale, faster than expected...)

Tim

In math, nothing ever goes out of style. In physics, maybe the heat death of the universe will decrease the relevance of thermodynamics.

Yeah, I was familiar with Schokley and his team and their discovery, but was totally unaware of the nature of the toob's inception. What are the odds on that, eh? Amazing!

You make that sound like a bad thing. Not so!

In exploring into unknown territory, when you notice something, you need to publish it (so others can review conclusions and/or repeat the observation). If it can be replicated, it's progress. If it CAN'T be replicated, that, too, is progress, because a deadend has now been marked.

Without publication and review and trial reproduction of results, there would be less progress in knowledge and understanding.

No, 'most scientific papers' are NOT wrong, by the way: that's from the context of a problem in small-stiudy animal trials, and smaller-study human trials, in reproducing the results.

That's an issue with a long history (read _The Youngest Science_ by Lewis Thomas, for a good treatment).

DeForest was a very weird guy. He was into flame amplifiers and wanted to put the flame in a bottle. Once he got the tube to sort of work, other people figured it out and made it a lot better, which included using a hard vacuum.

the

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You don't understand them.

My CV lists a bunch of comments that I've got published in Rev.Sci. Instrum . saying exactly the same thing. The problem isn't so much the people who p ublish - they don't know any better - as the referees who should have been able to weed out the nonsense. The UK equivalent - Measurement Science and Technology - publishes a rather more practical stuff and seems to have acce ss to referees who know more about practical electronics. One paper I refer eed ended up publishing a circuit with different part numbers for the integ rated circuits used than I'd seen in the first submission (which I'd been r ather unkind about).

ake

was specifically referring to papers in psychological science, and reported a rather small sample at that. Generalising the result to all science, and claiming that most "scientific" papers are wrong, is a rather Larkinesque stretch.

Somebody who had some idea of what he was talking about would have been a t rifle more cautious.

The difference is economics.

Heaviside calculated the required inductance of a loading coil (what we'd call series peaking) and improved the bandwidth of the first working cable by something around twice.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The site below, which seems comprehensive, contains no Caltech lectures. OTOH it links to Feynman's seven Cornell lectures. The first Cornell lecture more-or-less covers the Red Book Volume 1 Chapter 7.

Is Walter Lewin the new Feynman? Many Lewin course materials and videos are, or rather, were freely available online. (MIT apparently purged its Lewin videos.)

MIT cuts ties with Walter Lewin after online harassment probe

Thank you,