Physical reality vs abstraction Computers
The history of computing is a long story of adding abstractions on top of abstractions to the point where reality(if there exists such a thing) is unimaginable and unintuitive. You can choose one particular layer of abstraction to modify the system in a certain way but it should not blind us from the fact that there is a fundamental theory on which the whole system works and then there are other abstraction layers both above it that can help modify the system in other way of which your abstraction is a part. The most misleading explanation of how computers work is the cliched “oh it is just bunch of 1s and 0s”. I think what they forgot to tell us is that this explanation was built on a theoretical interpretation of a physical phenomenon. You could also say that computers work with a logical combination of transistors that take input as high/low voltage and output the high/low voltage depending on the operation this combination is designed to perform. That is not it. You can go further and say that it’s just a bunch of electrons orchestrated with varying electric fields. Building on top of this theory we are also taught AND,OR, and NOT using the illustrations of 1s and 0s bringing on yet another layer abstraction to what is happening at a circuit level. I am in no way insinuating that the theory is not useful( it is the very theory that makes computers sophisticated by bringing in high level programming languages) but that we shouldn’t use this theory to explain (in a hand-waving way) the physical reality of what is happening.
Enjoy Reading This Article?
Here are some more articles you might like to read next: