I was glad to discover this is an analogy to electrical circuits further down the page. It's a good topic to understand, the write-up is comprehensive.

> They are the only man-made technology in history that we don’t fully understand from first principles

…what? What about bicycles? Ice skates? General anesthetics? I feel like there are a ton of commonly-used man-made items we don’t fully understand from a first-principles perspective.

Am I missing something here?

No, I don't think you are missing anything. Only recently have engineers been inventing things from "first principles". I think for the majority of human civilization we've mostly invented and improved through trial and error.

yea all of modern semiconductors were built on a guy going "wouldnt it be cool if i could write using metal instead of ink"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method

How many computing or mathematical constructs fall into that category? You don't accidentally land on a new algorithm typically.

The author shouldn't have discussed inventions when the nugget is about "original thought".