Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1989)
I think more than half the time I spent earning my EE degree has been spent unlearning the intuitive (but wrong) things that I was liberally taught. I was fortunate enough to have an exceptional Physics teacher in high school, who managed to avoid a lot of the bullshit that less fortunate students were fed; sadly, I compensated that with some of my own (misguided) self-study.<p>This experience also taught me to actively mistrust &quot;intuition&quot; and &quot;common sense&quot;. Not that there isn&#x27;t value in intuition (quite the contrary, it&#x27;s priceless, from design to maintenance), but it&#x27;s only useful when it rests on a solid theoretical foundation. <i>Prior</i> to earning that foundation, it&#x27;s nothing but a (very bad) shortcut that people take because they want to feel knowledgeable, but don&#x27;t want to invest the effort of going through all that math mumbo jumbo.