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  • Hacker News
  • >"Some of the most interesting impedance matching occurs when energy comes in the form of a wave. You have probably noticed in a swimming pool that waves from a splash reflect off the sides of the wall. Because there is an impedance mismatch between the water and the wall, the wave energy is unable to couple into the wall, and so it reflects back."

    Observation:

    If:

    Impedance Mismatch = Reflection Of Waves = No Fixed Wave Nodes (Wave Nodes Must Travel in Space and Time) = Dispersion Of Energy in Time, over Space

    Then:

    Impedance Matching = Creation Of Standing Waves (creation of fixed, non-moving wave node points in space) = Preservation Of Energy In Space, over Time = Capacitance

    (Note that I'm not saying I'm right... I'm just saying that if A implies B (A->B), and B implies C (B->C), then there's a very strong possibility that A implies C through logical transitivity / chain of implications (i.e., A->B->C becomes A->C), in the above case that Impedance Matching strongly implies Capacitance (via Standing Waves)...

    Also, it should be noted that Capacitance comes in many forms... Electric (electrostatic), Magnetic, and in theory, any type of electromagnetic wave should be subject to Capacitance under the right conditions...)

    Anyway, great article!

    by peter_d_sherman
  • > On a larger scale, we can think of atmospheric carbon dioxide as an undesired impedance matcher, coupling the infrared light waves of the sun into the planet. Someday, we may decide to cool our earth by adding tiny particles of dust to our stratosphere, tuning the optical surface to reflect away a tiny portion the infrared waves coming from the sun. The impedance mismatch between the atmosphere and sunlight would create a kind of half-silvered mirror to keep us cooler by reflecting away the unwanted energy flowing into our planet.

    Good old geoengineering. The principle has been shown to work - in 536 AD [1], volcanic ashes and/or a cosmic impact event caused decades worth of cooling, causing or contributing to millions of deaths, pest spreads and massive migration movements.

    The problem is... if we screw it up and overhit our target, we're in for a repeat, just this time with billions of deaths.

    The question is... aren't we in for the same if we let human-caused climate change run its course anyway, just with us frying ourselves to death?

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536

    by mschuster91
  • who'd be in charge of the thermostat? if this followed my offices practices we'd be in ww3 before any heating/cooling had a chance to kill anyone
    by pestatije
  • From your link, global temperature anomaly were -0,4°C. We are at +1,5°C. We would need something like 9 very big volcano injecting tons of sulfure in the upper atmosphere to cancel out the recent global warming.

    And probably 3 meteor impact.

    by logtempo
  • Would tiny airborne particles be safe for our lungs ?

    Would they cool earth in such a way that it would offset carbon dioxide uniformly or would it lead to even more change ? Climate change is undesirable, wether or not Climate warming is invloved.

    by sdeframond
  • IMO it's a very questionable solution anyway. Either you have to constantly replenish this dust, causing huge economic costs, or you have to engineer it in a way that keeps the dust airborne for long times, likely causing all kinds of health effects when breathing it and making it very difficult to remove it from the atmosphere in any significant amounts on short notice.

    All of these side effects just disappear if we were to engineer this dust to emit a lot of radiation outside of the absorption spectra of water vapour and CO2, absorb a lot of light in the the absorption spectra of water and CO2, mix it as pigment into paint, rooftiles, road surfaces, and so on.

    That way absorbed direct radiation gets its climate change contribution cut about in half and probably much more for diffuse radiation.

    We could also biologically engineer e.g. grasses to have similar effects.

    I'm a huge fan of engineering various plants to emit light in specific wavelengths anyway, and making sure that e.g. insects pollinate and birds spread them much more preferentially. That way you can outcompete or naturally cross invasive species with them and then you'll just look from satellites were the stuff you dislike is spreading and send in automated drones to highly selectively spray anything that has weirdly glowing pollen stuck to it. And after repeating that a few times, you get rid of your trojan-glowies.

    by DeepSeaTortoise
  • Coincidentally, I am reading 'Scale' by Geoffrey West where this concept of impedence matching is discussed (amongst many other things). It is fascinating how impedence matching was arrived at in biological systems viq evolutionary pressure to optimize energy usage.
    by devnonymous
  • Whatever happened to Edge? They haven't really published since 2018
    by Metacelsus
  • Speculation, but Edge was John Brockman’s thing and he was heavily connected to Epstein, so probably has become a bit toxic for potential contributors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brockman_(literary_agent)...
    by nmadden
  • As someone familiar with electrical impedance, I don't like this article. It's trying too hard to sound smart.
    by smolder
  • Just read this article as well and thought the same. Quite a bit disappointed.
    by rvz
  • Anything from a funnel to a reduction gear on a ship is an example.

    Does low verbalization imply that a concept isn't widely known?

    Or is this blog post, itself, an example of impedance matching?

    by smitty1e
  • Reading this was a relief, I've only got a hobbyist's knowledge of impedance matching in the electrical sense and felt like I was going crazy... Good to know I'm not alone
    by ipdashc
  • It's just the transformer example does not sit correctly inside the EE domain definition of impede. Once you understand that word is not locked up to the EE domain, everything is fine (except in the EE world of course).
    by 1970-01-01
  • The whole article appears use a very loose philosophical definition of "impedance". As a mechanical engineer, none of the mechanical examples are correct either when there are real-world examples that actually meet the more strict technical definition of impedance matching, mass-damper systems in skyscrapers is immediate example that comes to mind.
    by rexskimmer
  • I just find this an interesting comment. Having an electrical engineers education, there is this interesting repetition of formula which is unmistakable.

    First you learn the physical equations, mostly applied to sound interestingly. Then at some point you learn about transmission line theory and maximum power transfer theory. Lastly, you get introduced to Maxwells equations, and how they produce the phenomena you’ve been learning about for years.

    Unfortunately that is where my learning stopped, and I never got an answer to how quantum theory resolves with Maxwells equations, and how it interacts with standard model and special/general relativity.

    Honestly I’d love an explanation of the standard model that wasn’t covered with mystery and math. It makes the idea of understanding particle physics impossible.

    by fps-hero
  • I think concepts from impedance matching could also be loosely applied to other areas, for example:

    - How veins in organisms branch out to give "energy" to different areas while being the right size for the required supplies

    - How people can adapt and communicate with simpler words but taking more time. The optimum is when both parties are "matched"

    - Information theory, data across a channel needs to be sent at a rate lower than its capacity, otherwise it's "rejected"

    - In organizations, when a message needs to be passed from one area to another one, each impedance mismatch between individuals can lead to some "information bounce" and make it harder to get a message/idea across

    - When politics adopt a measure, there's an impedance mismatch when people aren't fully onboard

    It's a bit methaphorical but the overall idea is that efficient transfer across an interface requires compatibility between the source and destination. Incompatibilities produce some sort of "reflections", "distortions" or "backpressure".

    by gzalo