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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| I tried to avoid becoming a superconductor, but I just could not resist. How does electricity work? Let’s demystify the life-changing physics.  How current is your knowledge? They pun; I pun. To the uninitiated, electricity might seem like a sort of hidden magic. Any sufficiently advanced technology... It plays by laws of physics we can’t necessarily perceive with our eyes. Well, then, it clearly doesn't exist. Anyone who has ever lived through a power outage knows how inconvenient it is. Yes, which is why I got myself a whole-house backup power generator. “If I lose electricity, I lose telecommunications. I lose the financial sector. I lose water treatment. I can’t milk the cows. I can’t refrigerate food,” says Mark Petri... Glad he's there to give us the dish. The universe as we know it is governed by four fundamental forces: the strong nuclear force (which holds subatomic particles together inside atoms), the weak nuclear force (which guides some types of radioactivity), gravity, and electromagnetism (which governs the intrinsically linked concepts of electricity and magnetism). The weak nuclear force is always described in pop science articles (and this one's from actual Popular Science) as being related to "some types of radioactivity" or "radioactive decay." That's all a lot of people know, which is already more than most people know. I looked more deeply into this a while back and gave up. Also, apparently, they didn't see fit to explain gravity, which is really the most important force for our day-to-day lives, as without it, we wouldn't have lives. Some scientists and engineers think of electricity as a bit like water streaming through a pipe. I'm the first to admit that, despite being an engineer, and despite articles like this one, I still don't really understand electricity. Might as well be sorcery. I'm not that kind of engineer. But what I do understand is water flow through pipes, and, yes, the equations have similarities. You know what else is similar to water flow? Traffic flow. Anyway, the article does manage to keep things simple. There's not even any math. I don't know how useful it is. But I couldn't let that pun in the subhead go without trying to top it. |
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