Simple or complicated

Which would you rather explain?

Recently our tutoring consultant was asked to explain how a transistor works.  He asked for some time to consult his references, and eventually put something together that satisfied the student.  Or (more probably) the student realized that it was actually much more complicated than he thought, and best left to a later course.  Our tutor would have been much happier explaining a vacuum tube, which does almost the same thing as a transistor but is much easier to visualize.  Unfortunately, vacuum tubes are of only historical interest nowadays.  (Or worse: electrical engineers consider them long outdated and know little about them, while historians are not interested in their details.)

A friend of ours had a similar observation.  He has been explaining the operation of certain pieces of equipment by referring to cathode-ray tubes, the original television/oscilloscope display device and the ubiquitous viewing screen of the twentieth century.  But while they are simple and elegant applications of electric and magnetic fields, they have become rare.  It’s no longer a good assumption that one’s audience has ever seen one.  Similarly, he had been in the habit of explaining many useful bits of physics and chemistry by referring to an incandescent light bulb, but those also are becoming harder to find.

It would be easy to see all this as the inevitable march of technology from the simple and familiar to the complex and strange.  Of course a smartphone is more difficult to explain than Alexander Graham Bell’s instrument!  But it doesn’t always work that way.  Consider the devices that the light bulb replaced: the kerosene lamp, or better the candle.  A candle flame is a very complicated process, involving convection, radiation, chemical reactions and evaporation.  Michael Faraday gave six popular lectures on the chemistry of the candle alone!  Edison’s device is much simpler, not only to use but to understand.

[Faraday had a particular skill at making science clear to the public.  We recommend picking up any reprints of his lectures you can find; very little has actually become out of date, even after a century and a half.]

The invention of the piece of glass containing a vacuum was actually a great simplification, one that allowed several technological advances.  By removing the air, simple things that had only been possible conceptually (like the effect of a magnetic field on a charged particle) could be demonstrated.  And used to do useful things.

By contrast, the march of solid-state technology seems to have been uniformly toward larger numbers and more complications.  The software being used to write this blog post is very distant from the cryptic lines of assembly code (much less the underlying 1s and 0s) that make it work.  More distant, indeed, than the titanium alloys of a fighter jet are from the hand-smelted bronze weapons of Homer.  AI learns by itself, and there seems to be no one who can actually explain why a given program does what it does.

It looks likely to continue.  But perhaps waiting somewere is a breakthrough that will again lead to an advance by making things simpler.