Electronics

If you look at the classic Bohr model of the atom (from 1913), you have electrons orbiting around a nucleus of protons and neutrons. Normally there are as many electrons (negative charge) as protons (positive charge), so the net charge of the atom is zero. The various shells or orbit radii of the model have different characteristics as to how many electrons they are happy having orbiting in them. The first shell likes 2 max, the 2, and 6, etc. If there is one less electron that what the outermost used shell considers full, it will happily take on another electron, even if this unbalances the charge. If it has just one electron in a shell, it would happily give it up even if it unbalances the charge. Copper, one of the best conductors of electricity, has 29 electrons, which means in its 4th orbit, it has one electron. It is easily taken away by something pulling on it. In fact, if you put a bunch of copper atoms together, there is a cloud of electron sharing with that one electron moving from atom to atom, and others taking its place.

There is a limit to how far you can get television signals. The power is spreading out the farther you are away from the source. At some distance, you reach a point where the noise in the atmosphere becomes greater than the signal, and you can no longer extract all the information from the signal. Digital television has much error correction, many bits are sent just so corrections can be made when there are errors. This helps on the fringe, but even this fails when the signal gets weak enough. However, error correction makes the signal perfect until you hit that exact point where the correction fails. Thus, digital TV has a sharp cutoff point - you get a perfect picture, or it goes away completely. Therefore, electromagnetic waves do lose information. Think of someone aiming a flashlight at you. The person walks further and further away from you. At some point, you are just not going to be able to tell. What if there were fogs or lots of pollution in the air? Alternatively, 20 other flashlights and you had to pick out just the one. It is easy and 100% when they are close.

All computer logic today uses FETs as switches. A FET is a switch with gain, meaning that a small signal change on its input (the Gate) causes a bigger signal in the Drain. Bigger does not mean bigger voltage, it usually means more current at the same voltage, so it can drive many other inputs after it. Two FETs can be connected together to make a logic gate, like an AND function. In addition, gates can be connected together to make flip-flops and counters and adders, etc.

Logic "1" is usually a higher voltage than logic "0", and logic 0 is usually zero volts. In newer processors, the high voltage is less than a volt, since the FETs are so small that 1.5V will blow them up.

Therefore, it is not the presence of a signal or the lack of one; it is a high voltage and a low voltage. There is nothing that the computer translates, that voltage is it, throughout the computer. That is what binary means, one of two voltages. There is no clock involved to make something binary all signals in the computer are all binary logic with a voltage. Even a clock is just a logic signal that goes between 1 and 0 at a periodic rate.