Electrons

Week 2 of SFPC has just wrapped up and I haven’t been taking enough time to reflect on things (what else is new?) so here I am trying to make amends.

I feel like my attitude towards the program has started to shift in a way that I love. I’ve felt myself captured by wonder and compelled to learn more and understand things on a deeper level. Simple experiences have felt revelatory.

Sitting in class on Wednesday, we learned from Phil Stearns about charge: how electrons pass through components and power electronics. It’s a thing that we’ve probably all heard in one way or another, but never something I’ve actually thought about and subsequently marveled at. I’ve never connected physics and computing, or physics and electronics, really. It’s something I understand but have never thought about. And here is an opportunity to literally control electrons, to bid them to move as you please and light this LED.

I’ve soldered before and I’ve plugged wires in to breadboards, but I’ve never felt the same sense of awe and satisfaction about an LED lighting up as I did that day. The fact that I understood both what was happening and why (admittedly not completely, but enough!!) was incredible.

For a long time I’ve been making things that worked and not caring as much about the why or how, because as long as it works those things are less important. It probably sounds silly, but this experience, seeing how something works, down to the literal subatomic particles traveling within it rekindled my desire to break apart and understand rather than duct tape and forget, and I’m excited to keep doing so.