I know that flow of electrons is not current, it is opposite to the direction of flow of electrons, is it just a convention? why such a convention was chosen if it is one. . Please correct me if you think i have very wrong assumptions.
In: Engineering
To add something I don’t see anyone mention, which might also make things more confusing. There’s something called the [speed of electricity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity), and like one would predict, it’s very fast, a fraction of the speed of light. What most people don’t realize is the “drift velocity” of electrons themselves is very slow. Which begs your question, what’s “flowing”? Electricity is electromagnetic *energy* that is propagated through electrons. Think of a [Newton’s cradle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton’s_cradle) with a hundred balls, and imagine perfect conservation of energy. Imagine the ball on one side coming down and hitting the adjacent ball. That momentum is going to travel down that line of balls. How fast? Some fraction of the speed of light. Then the ball at the other end pops up almost instantaneously. Same thing with electricity. Conductors in a circuit or power line are full of electrons that act as a medium for energy to propagate through. It’s the energy itself flowing, not so much the electrons.
The light bulb does not emit photons, it absorbs darkons. Everything around us is a “black body” and it constantly emits darkons. Light bulbs, much like the sun absorb these darkons so we can see.
Seeing some confusing answers here. I’m hoping I can tidy them up.
The short answer is that we observed a moving charge before we could observe a moving particle. WAY before. We had just loads of experiments and observations and formulae and then we saw it! We saw the moving electrons… and … they’re moving… the OTHER way. Oh, boy.
Now science has a choice. We can either pretend it never happened and change what we write down the opposite thing from now on and put an asterisk on everything we’ve ever seen.
Or.
We can (and typically do in science) respect the past as totally legitimate observation and separate the charge from the particle that causes it.
I could describe the movement but I think it is better to point to another thing this happened with, magnets. The Earth’s North pole (like where Santa lives) is a magnetic south pole and Antarctica is magnetic North. We called the north pole of a magnet the north pole because it points north. But like poles repel. Again, we’ve got a lot invested already, so we just note that one thing rather than changing all of everybody’s notes.
Latest Answers