34 ms·

When I was in EE at Purdue, most of my profs also railed against the hydraulic model. It really messes you up when it comes time to get into higher frequency di

When I was in EE at Purdue, most of my profs also railed against the hydraulic model. It really messes you up when it comes time to get into higher frequency digital circuits (CPU designs were just starting to brush up against quantum problems at the time).

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sanderjd 2y ago
Why would anyone be attempting to use this analogy to learn about intermediate to advanced topics like that? That's not what learning aid analogies are for... They are for beginners to gain some initial intuition in order to get over the immediate hump of unfamiliarity with a new subject.
- dmurray 2y ago
  They wouldn't, but people would create these increasingly tortured analogies out of the same motivations that other creative people would create, say, a raytracer in Brainfuck or a pregnancy test that can run DOOM.
cruffle_duffle 2y ago
By the time you get into higher frequency circuits I would think you would already understand exactly where the hydraulic analogy breaks down. Most grade school students aren’t doing any kind of extremely high frequency work, let alone even basic 60hz work.
sevensor 2y ago
When I was taking undergrad EE classes, I don’t recall it ever coming up. I think people’s comfort with and intuition for electricity are at least as good as for water, which actually behaves in deeply unintuitive ways. We’ve been living with switches and toaster ovens for generations now, people understand resistance, voltage, and current just fine on their own terms. Or at least, water analogies don’t help because people don’t understand water any better.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
  Once you start dealing with EM fields and even fairly common filter designs in the AC domain, the hydraulic analogy starts breaking down and becomes an impedement to learning... so my prof would say. I was never taught the water analogy but I saw quite a few students struggle trying to wrap their heads around a physics (EM, RF, potentials, etc) based circuit design and theory.
calmbonsai 2y ago
As a fellow EE, I was amused that the plumbing model never came up in my engineering classes, but was introduced (and re-introduced) at several levels in my physics classes.

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sanderjd 2y ago

Why would anyone be attempting to use this analogy to learn about intermediate to advanced topics like that? That's not what learning aid analogies are for... They are for beginners to gain some initial intuition in order to get over the immediate hump of unfamiliarity with a new subject.

dmurray 2y ago
They wouldn't, but people would create these increasingly tortured analogies out of the same motivations that other creative people would create, say, a raytracer in Brainfuck or a pregnancy test that can run DOOM.

cruffle_duffle 2y ago

By the time you get into higher frequency circuits I would think you would already understand exactly where the hydraulic analogy breaks down. Most grade school students aren’t doing any kind of extremely high frequency work, let alone even basic 60hz work.

sevensor 2y ago

When I was taking undergrad EE classes, I don’t recall it ever coming up. I think people’s comfort with and intuition for electricity are at least as good as for water, which actually behaves in deeply unintuitive ways. We’ve been living with switches and toaster ovens for generations now, people understand resistance, voltage, and current just fine on their own terms. Or at least, water analogies don’t help because people don’t understand water any better.

FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
Once you start dealing with EM fields and even fairly common filter designs in the AC domain, the hydraulic analogy starts breaking down and becomes an impedement to learning... so my prof would say. I was never taught the water analogy but I saw quite a few students struggle trying to wrap their heads around a physics (EM, RF, potentials, etc) based circuit design and theory.

calmbonsai 2y ago

As a fellow EE, I was amused that the plumbing model never came up in my engineering classes, but was introduced (and re-introduced) at several levels in my physics classes.