https://spectrum.ieee.org/open-circuits
"Eric Schlaepfer was trying to fix a broken piece of test equipment when he
came across the cause of the problem—a troubled tantalum capacitor. The
component had somehow shorted out, and he wanted to know why. So he polished it
down for a look inside. He never found the source of the short, but he and his
collaborator, Windell H. Oskay, discovered something even better: a
breathtaking hidden world inside electronics. What followed were hours and
hours of polishing, cleaning, and photography that resulted in
Open Circuits:
The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components (No Starch Press, 2022), an excerpt
of which follows. As the authors write, everything about these components is
deliberately designed to meet specific technical needs, but that design leads
to “accidental beauty: the emergent aesthetics of things you were never
expected to see.”
From a book that spans the wide world of electronics, what we at IEEE Spectrum
found surprisingly compelling were the insides of things we don’t spend much
time thinking about, passive components. Transistors, LEDs, and other
semiconductors may be where the action is, but the simple physics of
resistors, capacitors, and inductors have their own sort of splendor."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
