
Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1995) - Tomte
http://amasci.com/miscon/whyhard1.html
======
charlieflowers
This is very interesting. I read some, skimmed some, and saved the doc.

But I _wish_ the author had a section that attempted to explain electricity in
a simple, yet accurate way. He complains about the problems that prevent it
from being understood, but never tries to explain it correctly.

Fair enough for him to make that choice, but I'd much rather read a correct
explanation than a list of why all the other explanations are flawed.

~~~
justaaron
bingo. i read about 5 paragraphs before i started scrolling rapidly, until I
realized that this entire page was a litany of wrong-ness, an ode to fuck-ups,
a waste of my time.

please please for the love of anything decent and good in this world: TEACH US
ABOUT ELECTRICITY!

it's ok if it's only based upon the "current understanding" of it... just give
us an update as to the canonical way to describe "electrical phenomena" (er
how should we refer to this subject?)

~~~
wbeaty
Heh.

The very first line says that THIS IS 1989 RAW UNEDITED NOTES.

[http://amasci.com/ele-edu.html](http://amasci.com/ele-edu.html) is the large
collection of finished articles.

------
kgfive
"We use "lies to children" to avoid complicated explanations, but then we're
never up-front with older high-school students about the misconceptions they
probably acquired in grades K-6."

This pretty sums most of the "science" textbooks my daughter used. I self-
learned about electricity concepts from a book using closed hydraulic system
analogy
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_analogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_analogy))

I'm an EE now :-)

