The Science of Radio

I am reading a fantastic book by Paul Nahin, The Science of Radio, AIP, 1996 (there is a second edition of 2001 by Springer). It is a “top down” approach to teach electronics, with basic university math. He uses as the object of study, what fascinated many young people, until the early seventies, to choose the electrical engineer career: the radio. He wisely choose tube electronics, since its physics can be well explained with classical physics. Solid state devices can only be fully understandable with quantum physics, which is entirely avoided in most electronics books. Instead some fairy tales models are taught to electrical engineering students. Believing in a lie feels better than to believe in magic. Nahin cites Ken Greenwald, The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Barnes & Noble Books 1993 :

" How can sitting in a movie theater or sitting on a couch before my television duplicate the wonderful times I had when I was tucked safely in bed with the lights out listening to a small radio present me with drama, fantasy, comedy and variety, all for free, and all of it dancing beautifully in my imagination, day by month by year? There has never been anything quite like it and, sadly, I must say there will never be anything like it again. That's what radio ... and the nineteen forties meant to me."

and James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon, 1992, p. 17:

" Eventually the art went out of radio tinkering. Children forgot the pleasures of opening the cabinets and eviscerating their parent's old [radios]. Solid electronic blocks replaced the radio set's messy innards-so where once you could learn by tugging at soldered wires and staring into the orange glow of the vacuum tubes, eventually nothing remained but featureless ready-made chips, the old circuits compressed a thousandfold or more. The transistor, a microscopic quirk in a sliver of silicon, supplanted the reliably breakable tube, and so the world lost a well-used path into science."

" No wonder so many future physicists started as radio tinkers, and no wonder, before physicist became a commonplace word, so many grew up thinking they might become electrical engineers ...”