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
Electricity is not electrons moving as such. It is the force of the electrons that moves. Just like sound is not the coppar atoms moving but the force of these atoms moving. So when you are saying that the actual electrons move slowly through the coppar that is because they always bumb into other electrons and transfer their energy to these. Just like when you send sound through a coppar bar the atoms themselves takes quite a long time to move any distance but the force that causes them to move is able to go through the bar quite quickly.
So if you were to send one electron worth of current down a wire it would move close to the speed of light because electrons are light. But this first electron would crash into another electron and this other electron would be the one going almost the speed of light. At least for a brief moment as it would crash into yet another electron.
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