analog vs digital
termprogrammingnetworking
The distinction between a continuous signal that varies smoothly and a discrete one built from countable steps, and the boundary the whole digital age is spent crossing.
An analog quantity, a voltage or a groove in vinyl or a sound wave, takes infinitely many values along a continuum; a digital one is quantized into a finite set, ultimately bits. Converting between them is sampling and quantization, and the Nyquist-Shannon theorem sets exactly how often you must sample to reconstruct a bandlimited signal without loss, the mathematical bridge from the continuous world to the discrete one. The line is blurrier than it looks: 'organic' reality is often discrete at bottom (DNA is a four-symbol code; charge and energy come in quanta), while 'digital' systems are physically analog underneath (a transistor is a voltage we agree to read as 0 or 1). So the honest answer to whether organic can be digital, or digital organic, is that the labels describe how we choose to read a signal, not a hard fact about the signal itself: the same reality can be continuous to one instrument and discrete to another.
Also known as: analog, digital, digital vs analog