I joined Memorex Corporation in the early 1980s as a mechanical design engineer. You may recall the commercial “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” featuring Ella Fitzgerald. Ella sings live, and the frequency of her delivery makes a wine glass shatter. The same delivery, recorded and played back on a Memorex audio tape, makes a structurally similar wine glass shatter, proving the high quality of reproduction of Memorex’s tape. The commercial was clever, and viewers understood it. In an era of physical innovation, people understood instinctively how things worked, even if they weren’t familiar with the underlying theories of physics. That understanding of why certain things happen in a given system, under given conditions, is equally necessary today, but over the last three decades, we have abstracted it away.