It’s just the one electron… Allegedly
Can you imagine being the guy who just, like, claps his hands together and kills the electron, snuffing out all existence
Mum says it’s my turn to use the electron!
Ad on a DC system, the electrons move dozens of times slower than a person walking. They also don’t get anywhere, and power is still delivered.
It’s kind of shocking, after a lifetime of assuming electrons whiz through wires at the speed of light, to find out they move so slowly that the speed at which they move is referred to as “electron drift.”
Guess I’m in today’s lucky 10000
Hell of a lot of electrons coming out and going in though
It’s fun to calculate that from a socket to a light bulb it may take something close to a few hours for one electron to get to the bulb, but even then that’s an average. Some electrons don’t even get to the light bulb ever.
IMO, the more interesting thing is how they are all always moving at a large fraction of the speed of light, but over any large distance, they are that slow.
Things never cancel each other so well on the macroscopic world.
This is analogous to saying, the blades on a wind turbine don’t go anywhere, they simply spin, and yet power is created.
You’re just wiggling the saw back and forth, yet the log is eventually halved
The washing machine just spins left then right, left then right, and the clothes come out clean.
when you touch something we never actually touch it is all just fields interacting all the way down
just the
tipfieldsPeople are really just mobile energy nets holding other energy in. What if the fields of our energy nets directly influenced each other? Jk… unless…?
The balls in the middle of newtons cradle don’t move either.
Newton’s cradle sounds like a kinky sex move, which is ironic since Newton was likely a virgin.
In certain kink circles, Newton’s cradle IS a kinky sex move!
I knew it!
Yeah. Sort of like holding two ends of a chain and dragging it back and forth. Even if the chain isn’t traveling the full length, it’s still moving and you could still extract power from the system if you attached something to the middle of the chain.
imagine a bicycle chain between two sprockets, if you crank it foward and back like 1 inch, over and over again, you can clearly transmit power without the chain links going much of anywhere
Shit, that’s an amazing analogy.
That movement is still energy
Build a circuit to make use of that et voilà
Friction makes heat. Same thing really
Presumably the vibrating back and forth causes a net negative charge to propagate down the line?
There’s a neat video by smarter everyday (and a bunch of back and forths among youtubers, including electroboom) where they show it and argue about it, but the power is actually transmitted through the electrical fields ‘outside’ of the wires.
Imagine a loop of electrical wire that is 300,000km long. Your switch is at point A, and the light bulb is at point b, halfway along the wire. If the energy truly ‘propagated down the line’ it would take half of a second for the light bulb to turn on when you flipped your switch to complete the circuit. Interestingly, if you make the loop so that points A and b are closer than the lines maximum possibility (or, in other words if you imagine the loop as a 0, the points are at the left and right of the 0 instead of the top and bottom), then the light bulb turns on based on how far apart the points are, not the distance of electrical line between them.
Unless smarter every day made a video I haven’t seen and can’t find, you’re thinking of veritasium.
Doh! Thanks, that’s probably it.
Nah. Power is just the potential to do work. Clever electrical engineering just takes advantage of the teensy pushes and pulls to do that work. Like pushing a swing, I don’t move but my kid sure can go high when I apply those pushes and pulls at the right time.
Until they jump off Then The Things get spicy…
Theres a gnarly your mom joke in here somewhere
Imagine an old-timey saw with a lumberjack on each side, pulling it back and forth across the tree. The saw just goes back and forth, but effective work gets done.
The microwave doesn’t heat your food, it just vibrates the water.
Heat is kinetic energy and the water is part of your food, so the microwave does heat your food.
Thank you for explaining the joke
What joke?
why is everyone in this thread telling me to imagine something
Because imagination is everything- probably Einstein
So imagine a bus…
Does it leave every 21 frames?
The electrons don’t move very quickly either. And it’s current times voltage that delivers power. Simplifying to a single harmonic (pure sine voltage source and a linear RLC load), you need to know the product of the voltage’s and current’s amplitude (in VA, voltamps) but also their power factor or cos φ, the cosine of phase beetween them. If the cosine is zero, it’s a purely reactive (L/C) load with a phase of ±90° and no power is consumed overall. If the cosine is negative, power is actually being generated by the device you’re measuring (for instance, old elevators and escalators with synchronous motors are actually delivering power into mains when enough people are travelling down).
Amps are not joules / second;- that would be Watts. Amps = Coulombs / second, and Volts = Joules / Coulomb. That’s why multiplying them gives you power in Watts.
That’s true instantaneously but as you say, if the current or voltage are alternating then you can’t just use the AC current and voltage to get real power like you can with DC.
You are correct, that was a mistake.
However, although symbols of units named after scientists (V, A, W, C, J, Ω, H, F, T, Hz, S, K, N, Pa, Bq, R, Ci) are uppercase, they are lowercase when written out (volt, amp(ère), watt, coulomb, joule, ohm, henry, farad, tesla, hertz, siemens, kelvin, newton, pascal, becquerel, roentgen, curie) to differentiate them from the surnames. And yes, that’s why the Claude Litre hoax was created.
The voltage(electrical equivalent of force) is what travels.
It’s analagous to pushing something away from you with a really really really long stick, then pulling it back again. The stick didn’t move much but you still affected something far away.
Whats crazier is that in direct current individual electrons don’t travel at the speed of light through the conductor, but only at roughly 1cm/s.
Or, that thanks to the “skin effect” the current actualy travels in a very thin layer below the outside surface of cconductor. Most of the conductor doesn’t transfer power but only maintains the magnetic field to keep the current flowing.
No, skin effect only occurs on higher frequencies. That is why coaxial cabel is invented. But then they realized the energy in coax transfers in a completely different way.
That’s why you don’t have one thick copper cable but multiple thin ones.
I’m far from an expert, but that’s usually just for flexibility of the cable as far as I understand. Power wires inside the walls are one thick copper wire (or rather three for live, neutral and ground)
Correct, solid copper bus bars are also common in certain applications.
