What your philosophy never dreamed of!

Which is more accurate: Analog or digital devices?

Introduction number one.

One witty remark by P.L. Kapitsa, which changed not only his life, but also much in the whole of physics.

I’ve already written about it, but I really like it…

After the Bolshevik “red terror” against the “counter”, an acute crisis arose in the Soviet Department with the intelligentsia, many of whose representatives were recorded in the “counter” under any pretext and ruthlessly destroyed. And then the surviving “trusted comrades” began to send their miraculously surviving colleagues and students abroad, to the very bourgeois counter, in order to gain their wits. A.F.Ioffe was one of such “messengers”.

In his youth, Ioffe worked for V.K.Roentgen, published scientific articles with him, that is, HE was KNOWN in the West as a good and competent physicist.

He took the young Peter Leonidovich Kapitsa, who had lost his father and wife and child during the revolutionary famine, and took him to England to the famous physicist Ernst Rutherford in order to attach him to the equally famous Cavendish Laboratory as one of Rutherford’s employees.

Rutherford greeted them warmly at first, but as soon as Ioffe started talking about Kapitsa as a new employee, Rutherford immediately “got bored” and dryly replied to Ioffe that he already had thirty-three employees and all the vacancies were FILLED!

They say, go home without slurping salt.

And then Kapitsa asked Rutherford:

Professor Rutherford, what is the average error in evaluating experimental data that you consider ACCEPTABLE?

Three percent,” Rutherford replied, surprised by such a strange question.

If so,” Kapitsa said, –then you can hire me on the staff “within this margin of error”!

Rutherford was completely charmed by the ingenuity and wit of Kapitsa’s impromptu performance. He TOOK KAPITSA and very soon did not regret it, because Kapitsa became not only one of the most talented employees of the Cavendish Laboratory, and there were many very gifted physicists there, but also Rutherford’s FRIEND!

Colleagues joked good-naturedly: “Rutherford is the perfect scientist and person! But he has one little drawback: He loves Kapitsa too much!” Which, by the way, was loved by many other laboratory staff.

Thanks to this resourceful impromptu act, Kapitsa’s life, the life of the Cavendish Laboratory, and much else in experimental and theoretical physics have changed radically! Kapitsa introduced completely new topics to the laboratory’s field of attention, for example, the theory of super-strong magnetic fields. With the donation of a very rich Englishman, Mond, the Mond laboratory was built, which was supposed to deal specifically with obtaining super-strong magnetic fields and their effect on various physical processes. Rutherford appointed a SOVIET CITIZEN P.L. Kapitsa as the director of this laboratory!

But Kapitsa himself, either out of naivety or for some other not too clever reasons, STUBBORNLY REMAINED a CITIZEN of the USSR (despite the fact that Rutherford REPEATEDLY offered him to become a British citizen) and every summer he went “on vacation” to his native and beloved Soviet Union.

It all ended simply and rudely. In 1935, the “visitor” WAS SIMPLY NOT RELEASED back to England!

“Although there are warmer countries,

But THE MOTHERLAND IS NICER!!!

Remember this word, Kapitsa, forever!”

“When the State starts killing, it ALWAYS calls itself the MOTHERLAND!”

Romulus the Great, Friedrich Durrenmatt

And in England, Kapitsa did a lot in theoretical physics:

Only very recently, the hypothetical Kapitza-Dirac effect on the scattering of electrons by electromagnetic waves, more precisely, by the quanta of the electromagnetic field, has been confirmed.

End of the first introduction.

So, mistakes!

Any process of measuring a certain quantity in any field of activity, science or technology, is associated with some kind of INTERFERENCE in the measured process and thereby DISTORTING its “natural” course. Therefore, in any HONEST measurement of something, we try to reduce it. as far as possible, the errors introduced by the measurement.

They are inevitable, because not only do they change the course of the process by their “intervention,” but the measuring device itself introduces errors, because it is also “NOT ideal.”

AGAIN, we always strive to reduce errors, this is the most important task of any measurement.

But sometimes there is a clash of interests: Accuracy and convenience. Often, the inertia of spiritual laziness, the tendency to mumble caused by the previous reason, habits and dogmas makes us prefer CONVENIENCE and LESS “LOAD” on the brain to accuracy.

“WHY BOTHER?” when you can get some kind of result WITHOUT this unpleasant mental STRAIN.

Introduction or interlude number two.

An example of the dull inertia of thinking: electroencephalography (EEG), a method that has been known in medicine for a hundred years to “study and register brain biopotentials.”

The thoughtless and completely unjustified dissemination of correct techniques to an object that is absolutely UNSUITABLE for such “research”.

Electrocardiography (ECG) studies the electrical activity of two nerve ganglia (generators and converters of bioelectric impulses): the Sinoatrial and Atrioventricular ganglia and the conduction of these impulses into the heart muscle, the myocardium, through bundles of special fibers called the Hiss bundle and Purkinje fibers. And this is a method that fully reflects reality and is therefore diagnostically useful.

Electromyography (EMG) is the registration of muscle biopotentials and motor neurons that cause muscle contraction by sending bioelectric impulses into them. It’s also a self-defeating method.

But then, due to the stupid human inertia of pseudo-thinking, “scientists” suggested studying the biopotentials of the brain in the SAME WAY!

But the difference between the brain and the heart and the muscles is HUGE AND FUNDAMENTAL!

There are two generator nerve nodes in the heart that set a certain automatism of contractions. The muscle contracts from motor neuron signals.

There are FOURTEEN BILLION nerve cells in the brain, neurons, each of which is a generator-converter of nerve (bioelectric) impulses, and each has contacts (synapses) with other neurons in the amount of two thousand to two hundred thousand!!! It makes NO sense to study the “AVERAGE” electrical activity of such a huge system of cells and their contacts!

This is equivalent to encircling the entire globe with several dozen or a couple hundred microphones and, listening to their signals, deciding and UNDERSTANDING what “ON AVERAGE” people are talking and thinking about: People, various animals, insects, bacteria and viruses, seas, oceans, rivers, mountains, trees in forests and jungles, grasses, deserts, calms, storms, avalanches and more!!!

And these signals are used to “judge” THE STATE OF THE EARTH as a WHOLE!!!

It is not for nothing that in the hundred years of the existence of this pseudoscientific nonsense, “electroencephalography specialists” STILL cannot understand and explain such a simple well-known fact: When an experimental subject closes his eyes, sitting in a comfortable chair, completely relaxed in the silence of the EEG room, the device, the electroencephalograph, registers slow, more or less regular waves of electrical activity of the brain in the occipital lead. Called alpha rhythms.

But as soon as he opens his eyes or starts thinking intensely, solving a certain problem, this electrical activity DECREASES SHARPLY, at least, as the multi-channel device shows!

But “in theory” it should be the OTHER WAY around!!! The activity of the brain and visual center increases many times!

The end of the introduction is interlude two.

Let’s move on to the immediate topic.

To an analog-to-digital converter (A to D Converter).

The simplest question is: Which devices are more accurate: Analog or digital?

The Internet is full of answers to this question. Some honest authors talk about analog devices, simply, for clarity, about switches.

Others, crooks or interested advertisers, of course, claim that they are digital. Because, ATTENTION, they give results “with an accuracy of tenths, hundredths and thousandths of a decimal point!”

This is utter nonsense, because in a digital device, the analog value of the parameter is still measured (that is, with a certain initial error), and then it is SAMPLED, divided into short time intervals for digital processing, which ALSO INEVITABLY INTRODUCES an additional error into the accuracy of the measured parameter! And you can add dozens more digits “beyond the comma”, this will not increase the accuracy of the REAL MEASUREMENT at all!

So, which is better and more accurate???

The answer will be simple, even ordinary, logical, and somewhat unexpected.

Here it is necessary to apply the Principle of Conformity of the Measuring Device to the Process measured by it!

That is, when continuously changing parameters are measured, it is necessary to use analog devices.

When we measure discrete, intermittent, batch-quantum processes, we also need to use DISCRETE counters, that is, digital ones.

A good example.

If we need to measure the frequency of certain pulses, drops, tablets, or any INTERMITTENT process, the counter will count these amounts discretely and correctly per unit of time. But the amplitude of the pulses (if we are interested not only in their frequency, but also in their shape, amplitude, etc. ANALOG), of course we will measure with an oscilloscope or other analog device.

Another example.

Let’s say we measure the flow rate of a certain liquid or gas, and for this we use a device with an impeller. The faster it turns, that is, the more revolutions it makes per unit of time, the greater the flow rate.

Now let’s say that a certain ingenious inventor proposed using such an impeller to count coins in a vending machine, or drops, or tablets falling on the wings of this device. It is clear that depending on the mass and speed of the falling bodies, the impeller will rotate faster or slower and the rotation will be longer or shorter. The device will show us some flows, while only one coin, or two tabletops, or three drops have fallen!!

NON-COMPLIANCE of the device with the measured process!

So, again, the elementary and trivial answer:

The method of measuring the parameters of any process must correspond to the nature of the process itself.

A discrete, intermittent process can only be measured by a discrete event counter.

If we are interested in analog parameters, they must be measured with an analog device!

I would like to inform you right away that I am not a specialist in metrology, that is, in the theory and practice of measurements!

If I’m wrong, let my seniors correct me.

3 I 2025