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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?

#91

Post by hollerith »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #66

It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point in the future we realise mass shields us from a gravitational field that pushes everything in all directions at once as opposed to our current thinking that mass emits a field that pulls us towards it. Eg. imagine the earth below you shielding you from a force that otherwise pushes all mass in all directions constantly. You’re now more shielded from the push in the direction o…

Turn it into a theory that predicts exact quantities (accelerations) and I will start paying attention.

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

#92

Post by card_zero »

a1445c8b wrote: post #75
card_zero wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. "We rub our Tubes with Buck Skin", he says in the same letter. I was trying to work out whether the tube gets a positive or negative charge. I think it depends on what material is being rubbed with what: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Triboelectric-series_EN.s... The tube is glass, but is the buckskin fur, or slightly furry, or leathery? That would seem to alter the charge it gets.

> Hmm. "We rub our Tubes with Buck Skin", he says in the same letter. My immature brain didn’t get past this sentence.

He was merely investigating what happen if persons touch one another after exciting the tube, on or off wax.

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

#93

Post by gravescale »

gerdesj wrote: post #61
manmal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or amino acids. Many have a D (Dextrorotatory = right) or L (Levorotatory = left) form, indicating into which direction they rotate polarized light.

dexter is Latin for right and sinister is left, rotatory is probably rotation and hat fit in with polarization. Where does levor... come from for left? Perhaps a newer Latin "left" than I was taught?

It comes from the Latin "laevus".

Funnily enough, although "sinister" came to mean "the bad side", it may have come from Proto-Indo-European for the "favourable side".

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

#94

Post by mrunkel »

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.

In German we use “Akku” which is short for “Akkumulator” for rechargeable batteries.

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

#95

Post by ViktorRay »

hollerith wrote: post #91
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #66

It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point in the future we realise mass shields us from a gravitational field that pushes everything in all directions at once as opposed to our current thinking that mass emits a field that pulls us towards it. Eg. imagine the earth below you shielding you from a force that otherwise pushes all mass in all directions constantly. You’re now more shielded from the push in the direction o…

Turn it into a theory that predicts exact quantities (accelerations) and I will start paying attention.

Well why wouldn’t it? The mathematical constants could remain the same as in the current theories.

Both the constant G for gravitation and g for the acceleration for gravity on earth.

I am not a physicist so I may be getting something wrong

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

#96

Post by FLT8 »

ars wrote: post #26
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.

Actually both wires are full of angry pixies, it's just that you have angry pixies in your body that match the ones in one of the wires, so you don't notice when you touch one, and strongly notice when you touch the other. On top of that if we did not ground one side of the electrical network, you could touch either wire and feel nothing. That's called an isolated ground, and is not commonly used except in hospitals…

I was under the impression that we primarily ground one side to prevent atmospheric charge and/or things like lightning strikes causing large voltage differentials to occur between power lines and grounded objects (it's probably a bit of a fire and safety risk if the wires coming into your house could be sitting many kV above earth potential).

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

#97

Post by int_19h »

gus_massa wrote: post #79
beryilma wrote: post #65

I dont understand all the details, but Veritasium and others on YouTube have videos on how the current/electron flow is also an illusion. Since electricity and magnetism are really fields per Maxwell equations, the current flow and other electrical things that we attribute to the inside of the wire are really happening outside of the wires as electric fields. They have a much better explanation than mine certainly...

Those videos are misleading. Electrons flow inside the wires. They just flow much slower than what you would expect. When you close a circuit, the information that it was closed goes very fast but the electrons flow slowly. (It happens also with water, if you have the shower with only very hot water and you open the cold one, the output of the shower changes almost instantly but you need like a second to get the mixe…

The more straightforward analogy with water is a pipe that is completely filled. Even if the water moves very slowly, the fact that it has started moving is immediately detectable as some of it will start spilling from the other end of the pipe right away. If you have a turbine installed at the other end, it will also start spinning right away. Moreover, if you make the pipe wide enough, even very slowly moving water will move a lot of volume in a short period of time, and thus transmit a significant amount of energy to the turbine.

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

#98

Post by ChainOfFools »

gerdesj wrote: post #61
manmal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or amino acids. Many have a D (Dextrorotatory = right) or L (Levorotatory = left) form, indicating into which direction they rotate polarized light.

dexter is Latin for right and sinister is left, rotatory is probably rotation and hat fit in with polarization. Where does levor... come from for left? Perhaps a newer Latin "left" than I was taught?

Knowing that ambidextrous thus means "both right (hands)" makes me marvel at how such a brazenly politically incorrect figure of speech has for so long remained undetected by the cultural police thanks to a linguistic camoflauge that mimics medical-sounding jargon.

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

#99

Post by timschmidt »

lazide wrote: post #64
throw0101d wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Was ‘Blue’ invented or discovered? Fundamentally, it’s the same type of problem - and really more of a philosophical thing.

Color perception depends on peculiarities of biology. Numbers and numeric quantities do not.

The number of quarks in a proton or neutron is always 3.

There are a fair number of dimensionless physical constants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionless_physical_constan...

You can choose different number systems to represent the values symbolically, but the numbers will always be the same. At least in this universe.

Wildly, parts of physics are only possible to describe adequately using imaginary numbers, which suggests that we could have chosen a better name for them: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/quantum-physics-imaginar...

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

#100

Post by bmacho »

crazygringo wrote: post #51
bmacho wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

    1. the air is negative
    2. the air's temperature is negative
    3. the air's temperature is -1°C

    1. the electron is negative
    2. the electron's charge is negative
    3. the electron's charge is -1 p
and there are more levels in between and with higher precision. But you see, the 3rd version is true, not confusing, not surprising. The 2nd version is somehow fishy, but accepted in practice, when people operate in good faith, and it does not create confusion. baez opted for the first version, which is not common, true, or acceptable. Only to create confusion, which is trolling. While pretending that this is a real problem, for the third version. It's not.

I hope this answer is satisfactory, I hope to end this conversation, I don't like it.

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