[suroot]

I’ll beat a bit of a dead horse with this one. This is why I’m not a big fan of water/pipe analogies when it comes to the study of electricity, electromagnetism and somewhere down the line electronics. While I understand early pioneers used “fluid” as a kind of hypothesis, I do not think they used them as analogies. I think they were trying to derive what was happening by comparing and seeing if their observations matched their line of thinking. All analogies break down relatively quickly the moment you attempt to work upwards from first principles (as we presently understand them which for all intents and purposes is “good enough” given we got many things to work just fine.)

The reality of the situation is far more impressive and engrossing if we attempt to truly get a handle on what is happening. Only then can we have a clearer idea of the nature of things like impedance and where/why/how the formulas that we use are derived from.

[snakeyjake]

That analogy has gotten an uncountable multitude of people, including children, into electronics where "working upwards from first principles" is either not practical or impossible.

[jaredhallen]

True. And many people don't care about the details. My wife, for example. She just wants to understand enough to wire up her derby cars. The water metaphor is perfect for those situations.

[suroot]

In light of me prefacing electronics by saying “somewhere down the line,” I don’t see the quality in this comment.

While there are professions where half-way through you kind of have to go back to the early things you thought you knew, and examine them in a more educated light, I’ve yet to see one as egregious as this. Nobody past a certain very early cut off limit benefits from using water analogies, and there is a push in education right now to move past water analogies because too many students enter first year post secondary with, simply put, incorrect ideas, and it has teachers baffled.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

The water metaphor is fine for DC. The chain metaphor is fine for low-frequency AC. There's no really good analogy once you get to RF, or deal with the details of active components, then you just need to understand it directly. But the metaphors are fine for the simplified situations they're used with for teaching.