Electrifying Entertainment
In Iron Man, Tony Stark builds his first arc reactor in a cave. That miniaturized reactor was basically a real-world analog of this ECE component that stores energy in a magnetic field.
Inductor
If your LED suddenly dies after you hook it up backwards, that’s not a vampire’s bite. It’s this type of fatal electrical event...
Reverse polarity
Ghost hunters use EMF detectors to find spirits — but any ECE major knows they’re really just picking up these real-world invisible fields.
Electromagnetic fields
This professor defended his PhD in a suit jacket, shirt, and tie....with shorts
Joe Young
Though it may not ring any bells, if you take many sufficiently large, random samples from any population it should resemble this distribution
Normal/Gaussian
In Back to the Future, Doc Brown’s DeLorean needs 1.21 gigawatts to time travel — a unit that actually measures this electrical quantity.
Power
Your circuit’s LEDs blink erratically, like a Ouija board answering back. The real cause? Tiny voltages picked up from this invisible source in the air.
EMI
A paranormal researcher claims she can “hear the dead” through static. An engineer knows it’s more likely caused by this type of wideband random noise.
White noise
This professor's first date with his wife was watching the movie Aliens. He did discover his wife is claustrophobic but she luckily did not dump him.
Ray Simar
Though he may not have collected butterflies, Gauss was the true inventor of which well known transform
FFT
While she studied Physics and Astronomy instead of ECE at Rice, which superhero can manipulate energy by becoming different forms of energy within the electromagnetic spectrum
Monica Rambeau
As Captain Marvel:
The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #16
(October 1982)
As Photon:
Avengers Unplugged #5
(June 1996)
As Pulsar:
New Thunderbolts #9
(August 2005)
As Spectrum:
Mighty Avengers #1
(November 2013)
Your circuit suddenly powers on by itself at midnight. Don’t panic. It’s not haunted; it’s just this phenomenon where stored charge sneaks through even when the power’s off.
Leakage current
If your signal eerily goes silent, it might not be a ghost — just this type of unwanted destructive interference between waves.
Phase cancellation
In Fourier land, π shows up everywhere — and he carries over 30 digits of it in his head at all times, just in case
Santiago Segarra
Gauss was so into precision that he invented what physical instrument to first quantify declination.
Magnetometer
In The Social Network, Zuckerberg’s late-night “Facemash” hack depended on this SQL operation used to combine data from multiple tables.
JOIN
Your op-amp circuit suddenly starts screaming like a banshee — but the problem isn’t supernatural, it’s this type of runaway caused by improper feedback.
Oscillation
A zombie signal that keeps showing up in your spectrum analyzer might be caused by this phenomenon when you sample above the Nyquist limit’s grave.
Aliasing
While he passed on a career in hollywood to become an expert in optical probing, this professor was interviewed on a national TV show about the dating lives of Silicon Valley geeks
Gary Woods
Gauss nearly became a poet, but his obsession with these numerical sequences pulled him back into math.
Prime numbers
The glowing code cascading down the screen in The Matrix isn’t hexadecimal — it’s actually made of this type of character from a Japanese script.
Katakana
You probe your circuit and every reading looks identical — as if the signal’s been replaced by a ghost copy of itself.
Signal reflection or Impedence mismatch
The eerie sound of a theremin, often heard in old horror movies, comes from your hands changing this electrical property of its oscillators.
Capacitance
When asked for a trivia question this professor nervously said "IDK, ask rich b or something"
Peter J Varman
A devout believer in elegance, Gauss reportedly said that “Mathematics is the queen of the sciences,” and this field is her “servant.”
Number Theory