If this is your field but also you don’t have the mood for pedagogy when someone from another field has strong opinions, which is emotionally understandable, I’m curious what learning material you’d recommend working through to find your claims obvious; is a whole degree needed? Are there individual textbooks or classes or even individual lectures?
For the theory of sending information across wires, I don’t think there is any better source than Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.”
I’m not aware of any self-contained sources that are enough to understand the physics of electronics. You need to have a very solid grasp of E&M, the basics of solid state, and at least a small amount of QM. These subjects can be pretty unintuitive. As an example of the nuance even in classical E&M, and an explanation of why I keep insisting that “signals do not propagate in wires by hopping from electron to electron,” see this youtube video.
You don’t actually need all of that in order to argue that the brain cannot be efficient from a thermodynamic perspective. EY does not understand the intricacies of nanoelectronics (probably), but he correctly stated that the final result from the original post cannot be correct, because obviously you can imagine a computation machine that is more thermodynamically efficient than pumping tens of thousands of ions across membranes and back. This intuition probably comes from some thermodynamics or statistical mechanics books.
What is the most insightful textbook about nanoelectronics you know of, regardless of how difficult it may be?
Or for another question trying to get at the same thing: if only one book about nanoelectronics were to be preserved (but standard physics books would all be fine still), which one would you want it to be? (I would be happy with a pair of books too, if that’s an easier question to answer.)
I come more from the physics side and less from the EE side, so for me it would be Datta’s “Electronic Transport in Mesoscopic Systems”, assuming the standard solid state books survive (Kittel, Ashcroft & Mermin, L&L stat mech, etc). For something closer to EE, I would say “Principles of Semiconductor Devices” by Zeghbroeck because it is what I have used and it was good, but I know less about that landscape.
If this is your field but also you don’t have the mood for pedagogy when someone from another field has strong opinions, which is emotionally understandable, I’m curious what learning material you’d recommend working through to find your claims obvious; is a whole degree needed? Are there individual textbooks or classes or even individual lectures?
It depends on your background in physics.
For the theory of sending information across wires, I don’t think there is any better source than Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.”
I’m not aware of any self-contained sources that are enough to understand the physics of electronics. You need to have a very solid grasp of E&M, the basics of solid state, and at least a small amount of QM. These subjects can be pretty unintuitive. As an example of the nuance even in classical E&M, and an explanation of why I keep insisting that “signals do not propagate in wires by hopping from electron to electron,” see this youtube video.
You don’t actually need all of that in order to argue that the brain cannot be efficient from a thermodynamic perspective. EY does not understand the intricacies of nanoelectronics (probably), but he correctly stated that the final result from the original post cannot be correct, because obviously you can imagine a computation machine that is more thermodynamically efficient than pumping tens of thousands of ions across membranes and back. This intuition probably comes from some thermodynamics or statistical mechanics books.
What is the most insightful textbook about nanoelectronics you know of, regardless of how difficult it may be?
Or for another question trying to get at the same thing: if only one book about nanoelectronics were to be preserved (but standard physics books would all be fine still), which one would you want it to be? (I would be happy with a pair of books too, if that’s an easier question to answer.)
I come more from the physics side and less from the EE side, so for me it would be Datta’s “Electronic Transport in Mesoscopic Systems”, assuming the standard solid state books survive (Kittel, Ashcroft & Mermin, L&L stat mech, etc). For something closer to EE, I would say “Principles of Semiconductor Devices” by Zeghbroeck because it is what I have used and it was good, but I know less about that landscape.