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Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?

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Re: Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?

#51

Post by crazygringo »

bmacho wrote: post #35
crazygringo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you shouldn't say "electron is negative". That's weird, confusing, misleading, and trolling. Huh? By the convention you describe (and we all share), electrons have negative charge, since -1 is negative. When speaking in the shared and understood context of charge, you shorten that to saying electrons are negative. Nothing weird, confusing, or misleading, and certainly not trolling. I'm baffled where you get that…

I mean I quoted baez, but I quote it again: > makes electrons negative It is not true, and trolling.

OK... so you've quoted them again.

You still haven't explained why it isn't true, or why it's trolling. Just saying those things doesn't make them true.

I can tell that English is not your native language from the number of grammatical errors you're making, so perhaps you're confused about something linguistic here?

Re: Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?

#52

Post by somat »

detourdog wrote: post #38
wycy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really strange reading the words of such an intelligent person beginning to understand something back then that is so fundamental today that even laypeople understand it more scientifically. Really weird, but really cool to get a peek back into a scientific mind in the 1700s.

I often prefer the original language of discovery. My favorite is the term accumulator compared to battery.

That is a much better term, battery: inconsequential detail on how it is constructed. accumulator: what it does.

Re: Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?

#54

Post by samatman »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #24
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #6

A big part of this is we measure what's important to us. As an electrician, what's important is which wire is full of angry pixies. They're technical direction of travel is far less important to my job (and my safety). When doing electronics, the direction of travel becomes quite important. So there's a different point of view.

Anytime electrochemistry is involved it's important. But regular electronics not very much. I think positive and negative mostly trips up people trying to use what they think is happening to explain theory. When it's not that useful most of the time. What I could never keep straight is anode and cathode.

It's easy! Cations are positively charged, so cathodes are, uh, negatively, charged. With anions and anodes it's the other way around.

It makes perfect sense! Cations, you see, are attracted to anions. And reduced by cathodes. Anions? Attracted to cations. And oxidized by anodes.

Whereas cations are oxidized by anions, and anions are reduced by cations.

The only alternative here would be if cathodes and cations were positively charged, and anodes and anions were negatively charged. But then cathodes would reduce anions, and cations would also reduce anions. Even worse, anodes would oxidize cations, and anions would also oxidize cations.

And we can't have that. It would just be too confusing.

Re: Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?

#55

Post by IAmNotACellist »

wycy wrote: post #36
akira2501 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really seems like had a rationale: "We suppose as aforesaid, That Electrical Fire is a common Element, of which every one of the three Persons abovementioned has his equal Share before any Operation is begun with the Tube. A who stands on Wax, and rubs the Tube, collects the Electrical Fire from himself into the Glass; and his Communication with the common Stock being cut off by the Wax, his Body is not again imme…

It’s really strange reading the words of such an intelligent person beginning to understand something back then that is so fundamental today that even laypeople understand it more scientifically. Really weird, but really cool to get a peek back into a scientific mind in the 1700s.

TBH that's how I feel trying to intuitively understand and remember the various colors of quarks and their interactions.

Re: Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?

#56

Post by IAmNotACellist »

imchillyb wrote: post #16

If one takes into account the field dynamics, the electrons are indicators of electromotive force and not the originator. The electromagnetic field connects the circuit and then _drags_ the electrons with it in a flow. Technically the opposite flow theory would be the opposite reaction to the field drag. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The equal reaction would be the electrons being dragged with the…

>It's fields all the way down.

But what even IS a field, other than a thing through which scalar, tensor, or vector values can be expressed over some dimensionality? Also gravity.

It seems at some point we have to just accept there's this currently irreducible thing permeating all of the thing we call everywhere.

Re: Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?

#58

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

pdonis wrote: post #32
throwway120385 wrote: post #13

Because he didn't know anything about electrons, and the experiment he did involving rubbing amber and glass rods on fur and silk cloth only showed that something was transferred between the two materials, and that when the material containing the substance was brought near to the other material containing the other substance, the property conferred by the substances appeared to negate. If you read Teaching Introduct…

> there is no way of knowing the direction of the charge But there is--otherwise we wouldn't know that Franklin got it backwards. He thought the charge carriers were going one way, and chose the convention he did because he thought it matched the way the charge carriers were going, but it turns out they were going the other way. The signs of the charges are a convention--and the fact that we still use Franklin's conv…

How would you have known this at first from rubbing rods and playing with static electricity?

Re: Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?

#59

Post by throw0101d »

throwway120385 wrote: post #13

Because he didn't know anything about electrons, and the experiment he did involving rubbing amber and glass rods on fur and silk cloth only showed that something was transferred between the two materials, and that when the material containing the substance was brought near to the other material containing the other substance, the property conferred by the substances appeared to negate. If you read Teaching Introduct…

> Numbers and numeric quantities aren't a real thing that exists in the world. They exist only in our minds.

Is math invented or discovered?

* https://www.sfu.ca/~rpyke/cafe/livio.pdf

See also "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" by Wigner:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

Re: Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?

#60

Post by luyu_wu »

Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #15

Electrons were not discovered for more than a hundred years after his death. How could he have done the "right" thing other than by chance?

IMO the issue is that we used his convention even after we realized he was wrong. As a student, this trips me up immeasurably, especially after learning non-symmetric circuits.
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