dahiya tore-down my burgeoning prejudice against recent forms of first word art: when i tried to criticise AR/VR, he cut me off, pointed at a light-switch, and wondered how ‘flicking a mechanical switch to fire electrons that illuminate a bulb far away’ is no less crazy than ‘wearing a virtual-reality headset’.
from stockholm:life, by shobhan.
when tom asked us to make a simple interactive system with physical controls for his introductory class, i couldn't shake away dahiya's words. today, we frequently interact with electricity — in-fact, we consume 24,398,000,000,000,000 watt-hours of electrical-energy every year1 — and, yet, there is a lot that we don't understand about it2.
as i dug deeper to understand how electricity actually works, tom redirected me to kenn amdahl's book: there are no electrons. in it, while attempting to explain what moves between wires, he writes:
It’s Little Greenies.
That’s right. Little Greenies. It’s not electrons at all. Electrons are a myth, a superstition. They don’t make sense, they’re boring, and they’ve never been proved. Shoot, I’ve never seen an electron, have you? Of course not. No one has. Sure, the electron theory seems to work a lot of the time, but so did the Flat Earth Theory. The theories of Aristotle, Newton and Euclid appeared to work pretty well, too, for a few hundred years. Now they seem childish. All because bold and adventurous thinkers like you and me were willing to consider alternatives. Elegant and innovative alternatives, like The Greenie Theory.
inspired & amused, i decided to communicate this magic — continuous, laborious work happening all around us, by electrons (or little green things) — to achieve 'simple' tasks like lighting up an led.
the front (or visible) panel is a thin white mounting board, with four basic electronic-components stuck on it — a battery, capacitor, resistor & 3mm-led.
the electrons (or little green things) that move are actually 37-leds, mounted on a piece of basswood, that are individually pulsed via a microcontroller using five multiplexers & bit-banging.
for the curious, the making is meticulously documented here.
tom igoe for the introduction to the world of electricity & his help; phil caridi, nikolai kozak, octavio figueroa moya, christina tang & cody frost for their help; jasmine nackash & alanna okun for lending me parts; jeff's video about pseudo analog output; shobhan, rajesh dahiya, & kenn amdahl for the inspiration.
- global-electricity consumption in 2022; wikipedia.
- veritasium spoke to multiple physicists around the world, and sparked an online debate. in one of the videos, a professor says: “people think you’re pumping electrons, which is so wrong”.