I strongly disliked this weeks reading, There Are No Electrons. The author, Kenn Amdahl, begins the book by explaining how he wanted to create a more engaging, memorable textbook by adopting narrative strategies from the likes of Star Wars. This concept, while admirable and even seemingly promising in theory, is executed poorly through the remainder of the assigned chapters. Amdahl constructs a series of long-winded, broken analogies for electrical concepts, centered around the fictional Greenies — small, green humanoids with a love for concerts and parties which drives them into stampedes which power our electrical devices. Most of the content of these stories is absolutely unnecessary, and fails to add any interest to the concepts that Amdahl is trying to convey. Where a simple analogy to a ball rolling down a hill would suffice, he provides a long story about Chuck Berry, rock concerts, and the “need-to-party”. Worse, his focus on disputing electron theory often distracts from the concepts he is trying to express, and is founded on shaky arguments. Near the end of the passage, he claims that he wrote the book because he couldn’t get a current to flow between two batteries. In other places, he seems to criticize parts of electron theory for being unintuitive. His comparison between modern science and the Spanish Inquisition also seems to discount the vast amount of experimental data which has thus far shown to be remarkably consistent with current theories and forms the basis for any belief in them.