Also, for error correction purposes, different patterns of fourteen bits represent different patterns of eight bits. So there is no one-to-one correspondence of pits and lands to the data actually being demultiplexed, decoded and presented by the player.

20-year packaged media authoring veteran, putting pits and lands onto shiny plastic discs so viewers can be prevented from skipping past a copyright warning. So is a pit 0 and a land 1, or is a pit 1 and a land 0?

Neither!

The transition from one state to the other is a 1.

If QAM in wifi hurt your head, stay away from GPS (which involves statistical reconstruction of a signal below the thermal noise level of the receiver).

Also, ones and zeros don't exist. They are our understood significant abstraction representations of an analog world were there is literally no absolute in measuring and we use electronics to lie to us about it.

Good luck!

In my first job out of school learning about flash memory and learning that the difference between a 1 and 0 was just how much charge was trapped, with a threshold (or multiple for MLC/TLC/etc), that was when I learned its abstraction all the way down to the very 1s and 0s we’re paid to make dance.