Till now man has been up against Nature;
from now on he will be up against his own nature.
Dennis Gabor Inventing the future
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
W.S. Churchill Roving commission in my early life (1930)

Engineering used to be a down-to-earth profession. The Roman engineers, who provided civilized Europe with bridges and roads, did a job comprehensible to all. And this is still true in most branches of engineering today. Bridge-building has become a sophisticated science, the mathematics of optimum structures is formidable; nevertheless, the basic relationships are not far removed from common sense. A heavier load is more likely to cause a bridge to collapse, and the use of steel instead of wood will improve the load-carrying capacity.

Solid-state electronic devices are in a different category. In order to understand their behaviour, you need to delve into quantum mechanics. Is quantum mechanics far removed from common sense? Yes, for the time being, it is. We live in a classical world. The phenomena we meet every day are classical phenomena. The fine details represented by quantum mechanics are averaged out; we have no first-hand experience of the laws of quantum mechanics; we can only infer the existence of certain relationships from the final outcome. Will it be always this way? Not necessarily. There are quantum phenomena known to exist on a macroscopic scale as, for example, superconductivity, and it is quite likely that certain biological processes will...