“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Said by Arthur C. Clarke in his 1962 book “Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible”, it is an oft-repeated phrase that requires very little explanation. For our society to become as technically advanced as it currently is, delegation of knowledge is essential and the result of this individual specialisation is that many of the principles that we rely on every day are simply taken for granted. The title of this blog post is perhaps misleading; a more accurate description would be that science is the new alchemy/magic. Cars, planes, electronics, communication, bridges, central heating, digital computing, many of these are simply accepted to work via some logical path that has been worked out by someone or a group of people, but bothering to understand it is both unnecessary and uninteresting to the some of the general public.

Lacking knowledge about the systems that are in place around me makes me feel uncomfortable; blind trust in things that I rely on makes me feel foolish. I understand that the individual specialisation mentioned above is essential to modern living, but electronics is a means for me to get to grips with the systems that I encounter in my practise. Learning electronics appeals to the childlike desire to ask ‘why,’ over and over again. The skill ceiling is incredibly high, which I find comforting, though I doubt that I’ll delve deep into the maths side of things; I’m very happy to have a grasp of simple ratios and the functional workings of components and systems, but advanced transfer functions and other such technicalities seems far over my abilities and best left to the engineers and physicists. Besides, by not understanding the exact manner in which things function (down to molecular level, laid out clearly with formulae) I am able to retain some of that magical, mystical essence that keeps me coming back to the workbench. There is a sense of turning base metals into gold, where the base metals are components and the gold is some homebrewed device that I have dreamt up. This romantic appeal is something that I lean on a lot, which is perhaps why I am drawn to more hardware-centric analogue devices rather than their digital screen-based counterparts. Working with my hands and being able to see the objects that I am manipulating is half of the fun for me.