I understand that the electrons themselves in a material travel fairly slow, but I’m talking about actual signal propagation. The speed of an electrical signal traveling through copper can achieve very high fractions of c, but the speed of sound in copper is only around 5010m/s. What causes the disconnect?
In: Physics
You’re getting a lot of wrong answers here. It’s not about electrons pushing each other. That *would* be sound. The signal is an electromagnetic wave, i.e. light. The wire is just guiding the path of the electromagnetic wave, but no part of it *is* the wave. The electrons move as a *result* of the EM field, not the other way around.
The analogy that many people think of, with electrons acting like water in a hose, is useful up to a point, but it is still very different from reality.
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