This reminds me of when I was taking an advanced circuit design class. The analog circuit in question had many moving parts, and I just didn't have the intuiti

This reminds me of when I was taking an advanced circuit design class. The analog circuit in question had many moving parts, and I just didn't have the intuition. The teaching fellow at the time thought it would help to visualize a mechanical analog (ha!) of the circuit and drew for me a complex mechanical diagram. It was so complex that I found it more intuitive to just study the electrical circuit directly. After years of working with electrical circuits, I now often find it easier to translate a mechanical system in question to an analogous electrical system and analyze it. In fact this is where the phrase "analog electronics" comes from: It is an analogue of a real world (often mechanical) system. At the end of the day, these are all (mostly second order) differential equations.