Simple Syllabus of Technology

R. Fox, 9/22/2026, v.1.0

Table of Contents

Very Little is New 1

There are Stunning Similarities Across Technological Fields 2

Electricity 3

Some Terms in Electricity 5

Some Terms in Electronics 5

Conclusion 5

Purpose

One look on the internet for almost any course gives the impression that color, fancy images, emojis and semi relevant photos get us to knowledge. And while it is true that ‘visual design’ matters… a visit to a web site like OpenLearn can be so visually overwhelming as to become more of a distraction than a teaching tool. 70% of knowledge is vocabulary, 20% is human relationship and team work, 10% is math that someone else worked out that you can use (but be careful there). Most of vocabulary describes mathematical realities in an easier way to understand. Ohm’s Law is a perfect example. The purpose of me writing this is to try and remove some of the ‘mystique’ and make knowledge a little less overwhelming. Also, many people are in the work force today who know how to “operate” things… but can make terrible mistakes because they were never taught the basics, the fundamentals. This aims to begin with the fundamentals.

Very Little is New

Also… despite the over hyped claims of the endless marketing firms and CEO’s out there, there is actually very little that is new in the world of technology except for the ever rewarding pursuit of speed and precision.

So wether we are speaking of power, electricity, electronics, software, carpentry, plastics, 3D rendering, chemistry, metallurgy, machining (the shaping of metal), structural science, medicine, psychology, so called “Artificial Intelligence”, philosophy, or any of a million other topics… Ecclesiastes 1:9 tells us, “What has been will be again…” and that there is nothing new under the sun.

What we must add to this fact is that computational ability has become faster and faster and thus has left us with more time to apply the things we have learned since the earlier centuries. Also the evolution of mechanical precision and the manufacture of millions of microscopic electronic components using a kind of photo reduction in size and printing/etching on to semiconductors has made it possible to build machines that calculate so fast as to give the wrongful impression that they can think or are somehow endowed with human like qualities.

So while fancy websites and very exaggerated claims will attract clicks, the smart engineer knows (even if he does not know the bible and the Church and history) that there is indeed nothing new under the sun.

There are Stunning Similarities Across Technological Fields

The enumeration of these facts may seem boring compared to the slickest new e-Learning website. But after almost 70 years of life, I find the similarities of fields of knowledge of the universe to be one of the most exciting proofs of the existence of a Loving Father who is not constrained by time. We tend to think of ‘nothing’ as empty space… but the void that the creation story gives us is even less than that. I wont be branching out into Cosmology… but suffice it to say that I know enough about human knowledge to say these two things: 1.) There is nothing new but rather only things that we either were unaware of or had forgotten. And 2.) Every time we learn something we did not know before that “answer” generates anywhere between two and fifty new questions. The universe of knowledge God made can in some ways be compared to an infinite onion. You peel and peel… and it seems to never end.

So lets limit this to as few pages as we can and discuss only Electricity, Radio, and a few other topics.

I can mention concepts like magnetism and static and precision and so forth, but I will leave it to the reader to dig further to find the historical roots if you are interested.

Electricity

A round 600 BC, it was discovered that some objects from the Earth have a property we call magnetism. Some even confused this “attraction/repulsion” with static cling… but it is not static. The best description we can say of natural (as opposed to man made) magnetism is that certain metals (naturally occurring or man made metals) can have “domains” which give off a kind of invisible field which we will call magnetivity. The lines of “force” in this invisible field have a North/South polarity of their own… similar to the Earth’s magnetic polarity. For more than a thousand years this discovery was only a curiosity. It was not until man discovered how to draw metals into wire that magnetism remained just an interesting curiosity. While gold and silver were drawn through a tiny hole while heated to make jewelry around 2,000 BC… It was not until around 3,000 later when 1820 when Hans Christian Oersted found the relationship between electricity, magnetism and motion.

You probably know the rest of the story. There is very little difference between an electricity generator and an electrical motor. Wire wound in a certain way around a rotator with other non touching wires inside a cylinder (called a stator… because that part DOES NOT move) when charged with electricity… can cause the rotor to turn. Conversely, that same device can generate electricity when the shaft is rotated fast. This all comes from the fact that if you move a magnet along the X or Y axis of a wire… you generate electrical voltage in the wire. And similarly, if you move a wire along a magnet you also get a voltage in the wire. For a graphic explanation of this you can explore Lenz’a law in Wikipedia. Some may wonder why such a phenomena can not be used to make ‘perpetual motion’. The answer lies in the fact that nothing man made is 100% efficient. Both motors and generators loose a great deal of energy in the form of heat, sound, vibration, mechanical wear and friction.

One further thing: It is a helpful analogy to think of electricity as existing in 2 principal states and analogous to a body of water or a stream of water. One body is like water at rest… like in a big full lake or reservoir. This is analogous to VOLTAGE. It is electric potential but it may be sitting in a battery and doing nothing… not doing any work. But if you poke a decent sized hole in the bottom of that lake and let that water flow down hill… you have got yourself current. So a voltage can be potential voltage or it can be providing a current. Voltage is measured in volts. Current is measured in a unit we call Amps. Voltage multiplied by current is Wattage. Wattage is a unit or Power. Power is the rate at which work can be done. There are some very simple formula for this, meaning that if you know one or two of these (Voltage, Power, Amps… or sometimes even the rate of resistance measured in Ohms) you can predict the others in a given application.

Here is a curious philosophical and language problem with man. At the dawn of the steam age… many objected to technological progress saying ‘it is impossible for a machine to do work’. Yet a tractor seems to do a huge amount of work. A welding torch does something a human can not do by themselves. In fact the list of ‘work’’ which can be done by ‘tools’ is very long and growing every day. But were those who objected wrong? No… they were right. A machine can not DO anything without an operator or a program that an operator or programmer created. The problem is that because of the way we humans understand language, we tend to anthropomorphize everything. We have been doing this for more than 20,000 years. It is a hard habit to turn off. But in the age of so called “artificial intelligence”… (perhaps I will write about that later) we can be easily fooled into thinking that a “tractor works” or an “algorithm thinks”.

Some Terms in Electricity

Some Terms in Electronics

Conclusion

Just as in the software world, there is really nothing new (more on that another time)… so it is in most technologies. But the fun is in the details, in precision and in speeds.