Live data from Hacker News

What Is Electricity? (2013)

learn.sparkfun.com

41–48 of 48 posts

Re: What Is Electricity? (2013)

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use the scene in "the two towers" where they light the fire to let Rohan know that Gondor is in need of aid. I thinks I have to stop referencing Lord of the Rings because most high schoolers haven't seen the movie these days. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=beacons+of+mina...

At least you aren't referencing the Twilight Bark from 101 Dalmatians - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp-DW-2bq2U .

HA!

Re: What Is Electricity? (2013)

#42

I teach high school physics. Here's my notes/textbook on electricity with simulations and equations rendered in LaTex. https://landgreen.github.io/physics/notes/circuits/electrici...

Awesome notes. I haven't had my coffee yet so perhaps I'm just misreading this part: "In 1746 Benjamin Franklin mistakenly assigned a negative value to the charge carriers that we now call electrons." Shouldn't that read "mistakenly assigned a _positive_ value to the charge carriers that we now call electrons"?

I ran into this recently with vacuum tube diodes. There's a cloud of electrons surrounding the heated ground-plate. The source plate is at high voltage. Increasing the voltage on the grid attracts electrons, which stream from the ground and fly towards the "source." And I'm calling it "source" because the stream of electrons flowing from ground to source is a positive current from source to ground. Thanks, Ben

Re: What Is Electricity? (2013)

#43
post #39
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But existing theory predicts all those just fine, it just happens that some things are not in the same direction, but it’s not like one can ignore direction. The math is still always there. And I argue things going in different directions is a feature, not a bug, because it reinforces the point that net charge and net particles are not the same thing.

Right, the math is the same. We face this in physics all the time. You drop a ball and it accelerates downward. Should the distance it covers be a negative number? Well, it seems linear distance should be positive, but if it is, then does down become positive? Shouldn't up be positive? Or do we reverse from end-minus-start and make it start-minus-end? It doesn't matter. The math is all the same with just different la…

We're probably going to have to agree to disagree on this one as I just don't see the nuisance and I see some positive aspects to the existing convention which I highlighted previously.

The classic, and really intuitive, experiment that requires one to understand the movement of both the carriers and the charge at the same time is the Haynes Shockley experiment [1]. It has not been my experience that charge convention gets in the way of students interpreting this experiment.

For the vast majority of practical (artificial?) electronics, when designing one only needs to look at the movement of net charge. Passive sign convention (used by spice) is about the flow of charge, not carriers. Maxwell's equations don't even mention the carriers. It's not clear to me why one needs to visualise carriers to design circuits. In my experience (i.e. transmission lines) it can actually hinder students to consider the movement of carriers when designing a practical circuit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haynes–Shockley_experiment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_sign_convention

Re: What Is Electricity? (2013)

#44
post #12

It's interesting to me when I read it. We take it down to the proton neutron and electron stating they are charged with positive negative or neutral charge.... but what are they charged with ? Electricity ? What is it made of ?

It's made of the electromagnetic force. We can measure it and characterize it very accurately with mathematics. We can say what it isn't (gravity or the weak force or the strong force), but we cannot say what the electromagnetic force is . Sorry. If you figure it out you'll get a Nobel Prize.

> We can say what it isn't (gravity or the weak force or the strong force)

Isn't the electric and the weak force considered the same force these days? See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction

Re: What Is Electricity? (2013)

#45
post #43
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the math is the same. We face this in physics all the time. You drop a ball and it accelerates downward. Should the distance it covers be a negative number? Well, it seems linear distance should be positive, but if it is, then does down become positive? Shouldn't up be positive? Or do we reverse from end-minus-start and make it start-minus-end? It doesn't matter. The math is all the same with just different la…

We're probably going to have to agree to disagree on this one as I just don't see the nuisance and I see some positive aspects to the existing convention which I highlighted previously. The classic, and really intuitive, experiment that requires one to understand the movement of both the carriers and the charge at the same time is the Haynes Shockley experiment [1]. It has not been my experience that charge conventio…

artificial: "made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally"

Re: What Is Electricity? (2013)

#48
post #3

One aspect of electricity I think is useful to emphasize is that electrons in a conductor move more like the steel balls Newton's cradle (that toy you may have seen where a ball strikes one end of a line of balls, and nothing moves except the end ball, or you can pull back two balls and then only two balls will move, and so on). This can help with intuition about the distinction between "holes" and electrons, and how…

Here's my take on a cartoony conductivity simulation. I've got three models: conductors, semiconductors, and semiconductors but with holes. https://landgreen.github.io/physics/notes/electromagnetism/c...

Yes, that looks much closer to what I have in mind, although I also tend to think of electrons as not visible individually and doing this as part of a large cloud over a 3-D crystalline substrate.
Post reply on HN