The Art of Electronics

..All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green...
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

A few years back, while reading a smart book on acoustics I was desperately trying to grasp an equation that spanned multiple lines and took up at least a third of the page space. I did not really succeed. On top of that, I was vexed by the phrase above it saying, "this equation clearly indicates that..." In the end, upset and having concluded that I'm not ready yet to become a radio engineer, since I did not see anything that clear in the equation, I closed the book...

Several years passed, and I came across the famous "The Art of Electronics". What was my surprise when in the foreword I read that an engineer should be able to calculate mentally, without necessarily overloading himself with equations, which clearly indicate everything... The art... it seems to start right where the orthodoxy of theory and dryness of equations end, whereas fundamental knowledge and experience only help to liberate one's mind in the search for the new, the unidentified, the simple, and the beautiful...

Everything created by man in our civilization is work of art. This applies to not only silent paintings, statues, and great palaces inherited from great masters of the past, but also to wonderful sailboats, buildings, or mechanisms. The steam-engine invented by the genius James Watt 200 years ago has survived almost unchanged up until the present day. A line-by-line scanning circuit has reached its current simplicity and perfection and absorbed the collective genius of several generations of radio engineers from various countries. The art, the art of circuit design...

On this site, you will not find profound projects or circuit solutions that will turn the world upside down. Such projects are implemented at the enterprise level. Here you can discuss things of interest for an engineer's inquisitive mind, things that haunt you and that cannot be investigated closely on your own. So let's not sneer at what seems insignificant at first glance, and something New, Simple, and Beautiful, hence - ingenious - will have a chance to appear in electronics...