Computers are magic.
Circuit boards are basically runes, written in stone and inlaid with precious metals to conduct pure energy around in very specific ways to do pretty much anything we wish.
I’ve always told my students that programming is just magic. If you get the right combination of words and symbols, the magic lightning rock will do your bidding.
We write incantations to make the magic rock think and give us answers.
It’s sand we carved into patterns and tricked into thinking with tamed lightning.
Then there’s RF (radio frequency) which is the DEEP magic.
As someone who is trying to get Meshtastic to work I feel this. My pocket node can connect to people 50km away, but the base station with the chongus antenna can only connect across town?
I think someone made a floating lamp using the power of magnets about a decade ago. It looks cool.
Totally not magic at all, not even a little bit.
Bridge Diodes current regulation are considered physics? I mean, yeah, but about as much as any other science field, right?
It’s electrical engineering if anything
Electrical engineering is an application of electrical physics
Site, but that’s like saying “writing is an application of language”. The profession of writing is immensely different from the profession of inventing or studying a language. And the profession of electrical engineering is substantially different from the profession of studying electrical phenomena. There’s certainly overlap but it’s different fields.
Electrics are a branch of physics
So you’re saying Electronics is Electromagnetics is Physics?
In that case Biology is Chemistry is Physics and therefor Medical Doctors have degrees in Physics. If you feel like fighting me I will await you out back.
First of all, yes - Electromagnetics is a branch of physics. James Maxwell was a physicist.
Second - Electromagnetics is not electronics. Electronics is a field that applies electricity and magnetism to make useful things.
Electronics is a field that applies electricity and magnetism to make useful things.
No, That’s electrical engineering.
Electronics is specifically the study and application of devices whose properties are determined by the charge carriers themselves (the electrons), ie. band gap semiconductors.
Whether it’s science (physics) or engineering (EE) depends on why you are doing whatever you are doing. Understand stuff? Science. Make stuff that does stuff? Engineering.
Of course, there’s a lot of bleed and cross pollination on the bleeding edge. This is known as the science/technology feedback loop.
Yeah but Electromagnetics is the DEEP magic behind electronics.
You could, if you wanted, use quantum mechanics and electromagnetic field theory to do circuit design. But unless you’re building quantum computers or doing simple circuit analysis and wanted a real challenge applying Kirchhoff’s Laws, there’s no need.
So you can use the simplified electronics model where the current (and therefore primary charge carriers) is positive.
Source: I am an electronics
wizardengineer.So then Bridge Diodes are not Physics.
Dude, I’m sitting right now in front of a building full of people that basically study PN junctions for a living. If I tell them diodes are not physics they will be very upset.
Sorry to upset the analogue stereo repair shop but you’re not exactly Stephen Hawkings, okay?
Right now I’m standing in front of the building, so I’m definitely not Stephen Hawkings. Also I’m not dead.
Also also, Hawkings was talented, but not a solid state physicist.
If you want to troll here, you need to up your physics game. At least pick a relevant dude from the scores of Nobel prize winners my discipline has brought forth in the last fifty years or so.
YOU ARE NOT RANDOM TV SCIENCE GUY I’VE HEARD OF doesn’t work here.
OK but electromagnetics is totally magic.
This is why I always appreciated that Brakebills in The Magicians was basically grad school with better dorm life.
What’s the bottom right image of?
That is a mercury arc rectifier:
I thought you might also enjoy its German name: Quecksilberdampfgleichrichter
Or its Dutch name:
Kwikdampgelijkrichter
Sounds kinda similar to the Swedish word “kvicksilverbågelikriktare”…
EDIT: After doing some more googling, the proper name for the device in Swedish is:
“Kvicksilverlikriktare”
and sounds nothing like the hungarian “higanyív szelep” or “higanygőz egyenirányító”
It shows Cherenkov radiation of a nuclear underwater reactor (I think, I don’t know this exact picture)
Nope, just plain UV from the mercury arc in the rectifier:
Looks like cherenkov radiation?
Nope, that is a mercury arc rectifier:
That’s some fuckin’ 1800s steampunk adjacent shit
Oh yeah, the glass age of electronics gave us some really cool stuff!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimo_tube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_tube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekatron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geissler_tube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconoscope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_eye_tube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoscope
The difference between physics and magic is that physics works by describing the forces acting on a system. To predict an outcome, you just progressivly apply those forces over time.
With magic, you just specify the outcome, but not how you get there.
This is how we know that thermodynamics is magic. Conservation laws and Lagrangeans too.
I love mercury vapor rectifiers!
The “not a demon” guy is going to have a real bad time.
He will not sacrifice an entire room to a deamon. I repeat, it’s not a sacrifice of everybody in a room for a deamon.
Fool me once, shame on… shame on me. Fool me twice? You can’t get fooled again!
Because of the fatal dose of radiation.
Just don’t build a house of neutron-reflective tungsten carbine bricks around it or cowboy the beryllium hemispheres, hell, maybe just trust the last guys’ calculations instead of testing for closeness to criticality. Safe as houses.
Man, 2 full bridge rectifiers in the same meme?
This is either electroboom, or struggling for things to fill a memeWhere’s the second one
By elimination it must be the “what the fuck”
Edit: Yeah, that’s it. Someone below mentioned a mercury arc rectifier.
Ooo that’s exciting. At a glance without paying attention it looked like a reactor with cherenkov radiation
Quantum Tunneling, Quantum entanglement, statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged
Imagine thinking there’s any situation in which particles appear to move faster than the speed of light.
When you gotta go, you gotta go.
Spooky action at a distance
Einstein looked into that shit and was like ‘nah fuck that homie’
And that’s not even the worst part. Its theoretically possible,that every single electron is the same.
Utterly deranged
Fuck it, physics is magic. You study for years to learn the innate laws of the universe and bend them to your will. You know what most people would do if magicians were real people? They’d call them nerds for spending too much time studying and most people would avoid the subject like the plague. Magicians and physicists are the same thing.
Every sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.
My physics teacher is also a magician so you got a point
Depends on how good the magic was. If it let you fireball a room full of goblins with a wave of your hand, l read mins, lightning people with your fingertips like emperor palpatine, and conjure familiars to do your house work?
All without any manufacturing facilities and minimal capital outlay
I dare say physics would be more popular then
- Fireball? We have rocket launchers.
- Lightning people? We have tasers.
- Mind reading? Ok, I’ll give you that.
- Conjure familiars? Buy a dish washer or cleaner service or whatever.
Many of the fantasy powers can be done. It isn’t a question of capability but of economics. The economics are ignored in most stories, no matter if it’s fantasy or a real world thriller.
Tasers and shooting lightning from your fingertips aren’t even close to the same thing
But the point remains that, yes, society can do a thing but the power of wizards in most fantasy stories largely comes from personal, internal, strength rather than the ability to leverage a vast web of engineers, laborers and infrastructure in the outside world
If someone dropped you in a remote area you wouldn’t just whip up a quick dishwasher to get a job done. The parallel between technology and magic as seen in most fantasy stories is weak at best
Conjure familiars? Buy a dish washer or cleaner service or whatever.
Also washing machines, robot vacuums, robot lawn mowers.
But that’s never how magic is depicted - it always takes decades of knowledge and learning or powerful enchanted artifacts forged from rare minerals and materials, and rituals which always name a price.
Modern magic can do all those things - if you have the right artifacts, likewise made of precious metals forged by lightning and etched with beams of sunfire and inlaid with gemstones from beyond the sea, fuelled by the ichor alchemically distilled from the remnants of ancient forests and carefully assembled by entire courts of white-robed magi who have each spent decades perfecting their deep knowledge of ritual and arcane lore.
With these artifacts, I can incinerate an entire room with a twitch of my finger upon a staff of fire summoning, read minds with a helm of probing, lightning people with a tiny wand of stunning, and conjure familiar from across the world to do my bidding on my black mirror for the small sacrifice of tiny particles of lightning in a distant runestone.
We all crowning ourselves high wizards of the college of Winterholm yet the coolest bending of universal laws I’ve done is an acid-base titration. WHERE BROMOTHYMOL BLUE GO?!?
Saw a working mercury arc rectifier for the first time recently and those things are wild, definitely don’t look “right”
Yeah, don’t touch it or it kills you with a lightning strike.
Just about anything with “black,” or, “dark,” in its name, be very skeptical. 🧐 But quantum entanglement, that’s the good stuff. Only GR’s SpaceTime mechanics comes close to being as crazy.
what are GR’s spacetime mechanics?
