Radio Days

by Fernando Deeke Sasse
Friday, Feb 11, 2011
Flooded Mind
Thoughts and Questions on Science, Minds, Existencehttp://moonlitknight.blogspot.com/

I am reading a fantastic book
by Paul Nahin, The Science of Radio, AIP, 1996
(there is a second edition of 2001 by Springer).

It is a “top down” approach
to teach electronics,
with basic university math.

He uses as the object of study,
what fascinated many young people,
until the early seventies, to choose
the electrical engineer career: the radio.

He wisely choose tube electronics,
since its physics can be well explained
with classical physics.

Solid state devices
can only be fully understandable
with quantum physics,
which is entirely avoided
in most electronics books.

Instead some fairy tales models
are taught to electrical engineering students.

Believing in a lie feels better
than to believe in magic.

Nahin cites Ken Greenwald,
The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
Barnes & Noble Books 1993 :

" How can sitting in a movie theater
or sitting on a couch before my television
duplicate the wonderful times I had
when I was tucked safely in bed
with the lights out
listening to a small radio
present me with drama,
fantasy, comedy and variety,
all for free, and all of it
dancing beautifully in my imagination,
day by month by year?

There has never been anything quite like it
and, sadly, I must say there will
never be anything like it again.

That's what radio ...
and the nineteen forties meant to me."

and James Gleick, Genius:
The Life and Science of Richard Feynman,
Pantheon, 1992, p. 17:

" Eventually the art went out of radio tinkering.

Children forgot the pleasures
of opening the cabinets and eviscerating
their parent's old [radios].

Solid electronic blocks replaced
the radio set's messy innards-so
where once you could learn
by tugging at soldered wires
and staring into the orange glow
of the vacuum tubes,
eventually nothing remained
but featureless ready-made chips,
the old circuits compressed
a thousandfold or more.

The transistor, a microscopic quirk
in a sliver of silicon, supplanted
the reliably breakable tube,
and so the world lost
a well-used path into science."

" No wonder so many future physicists
started as radio tinkers, and no wonder,
before physicist became a commonplace word,
so many grew up thinking
they might become electrical engineers ...”