Enlightenment

In the course of one's life, there are a few moments of enlightenment that significantly alter one's conception. Here are the some of the technical nature.

Origin of Scientific Theory

Studying sciences up to high school gives the impression that a scientific theory is a summary of all the scientific facts and observations which are so painstakingly collected. Then there are modern physics with theory of relativity and quantum theory, which are much hard to deduce from just experimental observations. There was relatively little experimental data to suggest the theory of general relativity. Einstein claimed that scientific theory is the free creation of human mind. Kant already pointed out that the condition of human mind shapes the perception of external world. Science does not simply proceed from experiments to theory.

Evolution of Humans

From my early science classes, it seemed natural that the human species evolved from local apes. So the Peking man might be the ancestor of the Asian people. It was astonishing to learn that all humans evolved from a single group from Africa which migrated to the rest of the world.

Pseudo code

When I first learned about computer programming in high school, the teacher drew the flow diagrams. I never quite got it and programming was very hard for me. Then in the college, the professor showed the pseudo code and stepwise refinement. You start with very high level human language description and refine it to the degree that can be coded in the computer programming language. Suddenly programming became a lot easier. Later I learned that the technique was described in an article "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement" by Niklaus Wirth in 1971.

Circuit Theory

In the high school physics class, I encountered some circuit analysis problems. At that time, no systematic approach was presented. Each problem seemed to require some trick. Finally, in the first course of electrical engineering, the Kirchhoff's circuit laws were introduced, then there was a mechanical way for all linear circuits. But later in the real world engineering, it became clear the loop method and the nodal method were unwieldy for anything but the simplest circuits.

Computer architecture

The first introduction to central processing unit (CPU) was ugly. The accumulator architecture of the early days just did not appeal to me. Then the x86 assembly class was even worse; it is hard to like x86 architecture. Only after I read Hennessy and Patterson's book on RISC architecture, the whole computer design started to make sense to me. But it was a little too late.