On 1s and 0s

I was sitting with my son watching one of his favorite TV shows (StoryBots) the other day and they started singing about computers. "It's all 1s and 0s," the song went cheerfully, as if this explained everything about the digital world.

This is one of those simplified explanations that has become ubiquitous, but it misses something fundamental about what's actually happening inside our devices.

The truth is, computers don't actually process abstract mathematical digits. What we call "1s and 0s" are really physical states - open and closed circuits, the presence or absence of electrical current. It seems like a logical abstraction to help us conceptualize computing, but we're really just talking about electricity flowing or not flowing through pathways we've designed.

I think about this often while working with software engineers who are many layers removed from these physical realities. We build on abstraction after abstraction, from transistors that can be either "on" or "off", through machine code, through high-level languages, to the interfaces we interact with daily. Each layer creates more distance from the physical foundation.

My son is already curious about how electicity and magnetism work, so when he asks me how the computer works, I'm not going to sing "it's all 1s and 0s." I'll tell him that inside are billions of tiny switches that can be turned on or off, just like the electrical switches which power the light and the ceiling fan. The pattern of these switches creates everything he sees on the screen.

There's something tangible about that explanation that the binary abstraction misses. It connects the digital back to the physical world, reminding us that even our most advanced technologies are ultimately physical systems.