Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1989)

Think of the behavior of RF transmission lines. RF is after all just long wavelength light or EM waves.

So obviously a piece of pipe is a circular waveguide and it works more or less like optical fiber.

It helps if you know how optical fiber works, across a boundary with a big enough difference in speed of light in the material, you get total internal reflection and it bounces back in.

Now people are pretty chill with circular waveguide as a transmission line, but there are numerous other schemes and eventually you end up with microstripline or twin-lead that TVs used to use or eventually one wire Goubau line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-wire_transmission_line

Once you're chill with a zillion small steps from circular waveguide to G-line, wait, G-line is what your prof said that initially sounded ridiculous, but its not so ridiculous after all, with some new perspective.

Information has mass. Not much. Surely charge on a dram capacitor is s bit (oh the pun) of energy and energy is mass.

An excellent example of electron movement is a DC current in a metal plating tank or refining tank. Every atom of aluminum or copper or plated anything took the movement of precisely one electron (simplification because there are some non-electroplating methods for some base/plate combos, but yeah pretty much aluminium is a block of solidified electricity)

Hmm. I learned about E&M theory from Halliday and Resnick, and the practical stuff from Horowitz and Winfield (The Art of Electronics) and they were pretty precise about distinctions between electrons, holes, charge, flow of charge, and so forth. Sounds like I dodged a bullet by not being drawn too much to electronics as a youth, waiting instead to learn about it as a college physics major.

I suspect I'm about to regret this, but here comes the electricity analogies for accounting, the appendix to your 8 lines.

A balance sheet is like charge on an array of loosely connected capacitors (or batteries). I know I got a pile of electrons (and holes) stacked up somewheres, and the balance sheet shows where. All "accounting circuits" are electrically neutral and the number of electrons and holes on your balance sheet MUST match.

A income sheet is like looking at the individual cell results from a solar array in parallel. So you got 10 aH out of that entire array, now which cells contributed more or less of their share, and which battery cells soaked up more or less than their share of charge?

The cash flow sheet tells you how fast electricity energy moved, essentially a power. So your 99 watt-hour laptop battery holds 99 watt-hours, but how many times did you fill and empty it in a year, how many times did you turn over the energy in the battery?

Once you learn op-amps you can do some hideous analog computing analogies, but don't call up what ye can't put down, so I'm not even trying that. So a financial derivative is like a sample and hold ckt connected to a four quadrant analog multiplier and a log/antilog ckt, or maybe this is just too far of an analogy not to be nonsense.

The purpose of accounting (aside from mere control fraud prevention, at least optimistically) is to squirt out some ratios to help make management decisions. Much like the transistor collector current is not terribly interesting nor is the emitter current at a large enough scale, but the ratio is exciting because back in the old days people made management decisions to select one transistor over the other based on the ratio of those currents, which is essentially how good of an amplifier it is. Much as income statment vs cash flow ratio tells you a lot about a retail establishment compared to its peers, how long "stuff" is sitting on shelves before getting sold. That current ratio is a bipolar transistor alpha ratio which no one uses anymore. Kind of like how people used to make investment decisions based on the ratios in the famous Graham and Dodd book, but no one has invested on fundamental ratios in, gosh I donno, 30 years? Its been a long credit bubble and fundamentals don't matter in a credit bubble.

I have no idea what a credit bubble is in EE terms. Some twisted analogy of trapped charge on a Teflon dielectric resulting in an integrator getting saturated eventually, but until it does the ride is pretty exciting.

I would extend this post with my traditional HN automobile analogy but I'm not sure there's enough liquor in the world to achieve that level of debauchery. So ... Keynesian economics policy sees the role of the government as like an electronic speed control on the automobile, uh, kinda.

So, you're saying that capacitors store electrons?!

Debunking this particular conception was the whole point of my capacitor article http://amasci.com/emotor/cap1.html

Capacitors "store" electrons, like springs "store" steel, or rubber bands "store" rubber. A charged capacitor has exactly the same number of electrons as an "uncharged" capacitor.

When "charging" a capacitor, charge is forced into one terminal, and exactly equal charge comes out of the other terminal. No electrons build up inside, nor are placed into it. They've just been moved around inside, same as the steel spring, or the spherical tank in the water analogy.

What then do capacitors store? EXACTLY! That's the questions that students should be asking. They won't think to ask it, if they've been taught that capacitors are like buckets full of electrons. Well, what does a steel spring store? Or a stretched rubber band? KG of steel or rubber? Nope. Capacitors store joules, not coulombs.

The above concepts open the way to unifying several ideas: capacitors store charge in the same way that inductors store charge! In both components, energy is stored, as e-fields in the case of capacitors, b-fields in the case of conductors.