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 isn’t sound?
Sound is moving the atoms of the media, the copper wire in your example. This takes time, as the atoms are held together with metallic bonds.
Electricity is a change in electric potential. It’s not an electron traveling the length of the wire, it’s just bumping into the first electron, who bumps into the next, … to the end. The “speed of electric field bumping”, is unrelated to the speed of sound as the atoms themselves don’t actually move.
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