Eli5: What is the real difference between analog and digital?

1.07K views

I tried looking it up, and my brain just wasn’t making sense of it, but I haven’t had coffee yet so.

In: 0

25 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

A light switch is digital. It can either be off and on, but nothing in between. A light dimmer is analog. It can be in any state ranging from fully off to fully on.

The clever thing about digital electronics is that it can pretend to be analog by switching on and off extremely fast and/or in complex ways. This pretending is often more accurate than trying to keep an analog system in the exact required state. An electronic component may be a little more conductive when it gets hot, for instance, meaning that adjusting its conductance precisely in all conditions is a difficult task, but switching it rapidly off and on, so that the average conductance looks the same, is much easier. This, plus the fact that digital electronics can be tricked into doing enormously complex math with pinpoint accuracy, is what has lead to the domination of digital technology.

Edit: we may well be heading for an analog revolution, because we have recently been tricking enormously complex math into doing things the way brains do, by pretending to be somewhat analog. If we can make a machine that *is* analog and does the same thing, it can potentially be much quicker.

You are viewing 1 out of 25 answers, click here to view all answers.