What is Electricity?
learn.sparkfun.com
learn.sparkfun.com
Everything is really run by blue smoke and your cables are tubes to move it around. The wire inside the cable is just for strength.
You can see this is true when something shorts. The resulting hole in the system allows some blue smoke to escape, and the machine then stops working.
Tragically lacking in armadillos though. Maybe he could have got further if he'd included a few.
He said "I'm sorry, I did use to know, but I've forgotten".
"How very unfortunate," said the professor. "In all of history, only two people have known what electricity is. One the creator, and the other yourself. And now one of the two has forgotten."
"the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again. This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact, the last year any new electricity was generated was 1937."
and
"AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you scuffed your feet long enough without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger would explode! But this is nothing to worry about unless you have carpeting."
ps: really nice kind of humor running in this article, love it
``` you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpet so that they will attract dirt you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpet so that they will attract dirt ```
As my prof used to say about AC, "you don't pay for the swing, you pay for the push".
https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/9/5/6/1/4/519fcd42ce395f804c...
"Plasmons are being considered as a means of transmitting information on computer chips, since plasmons can support much higher frequencies (into the 100 THz range, while conventional wires become very lossy in the tens of GHz). However, for plasmon-based electronics to be useful, a plasmon-based amplifier analogous to the transistor, called a plasmonstor, first needs to be created."
So yeah, to all those applied physicists in the audience, hurry up and unleash the plasmonstor! (does anyone really call it that?)
It takes place in a modern day world where "magic" was discovered decades ago and is now a formal science with graduate programs right up there with engineering and physics. It has rules, and in fact one character just created a magical quine (which was apparently thought to be impossible).
If every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, I wonder what the turning point was when people stopped thinking of electricity as magic and instead thought of it as science.
When you get into talk about electrons, how they flow, how they transfer between atoms, and how we end up harnessing them, it is very easy for the D&D nerd in me to mentally replace "electrons" with "mana".
Absolutely fascinating world we live in.
Once they could make predictions and those predictions were verified by reality. "When I flip this switch the light will turn on.....When I move this magnet past this wire I can shock my lab assistant...."
I don't know much about D&D but I would venture the guess that electrons are far stranger than mana. I mean, not only do they have a wavelength[0], you can do the Double Slit experiment with them[1], but they also have an intrinsic angular momentum and there are rules of which electron can be where based on this "spin"[2]. That's just for starters.
Calling them "mana" (whatever that is) might not be any more wrong than calling them particles.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_wave 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_%28physics%29
"Quantum electrodynamics and shit. I'm not a physicist."
I wasn't all that impressed with that answer until many years later after reading Feynman lectures.
If this was true, then why does a negative charge not attract other negative charges?
"Electricity is briefly defined as the flow of electric charge, but there’s so much behind that simple statement"
Electricity is the force not the flow. The flow is the current. The term, "Electricity" in every college course I had on it in getting my degrees is always the EMF (Electromotive Force).
Sorry to nit pick but I just have a real problem when articles are written from sense of authority (An electronics company) and don't get the details correct. It can kick off a cycle of incorrect learning and confusion if you're relatively new and getting into electronics.
We will see if they update it.
> Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and flow of electric charge.
I doubt the article will steer people wrong. The gravity/e-field analogy is accurate, and they're clear to state that Bohr model of the atom is a useful model while providing a link to more info so interested readers could dig in there if they wanted.
> Electricity is the force not the flow...."Electricity"...is always the EMF
Speaking of details the Electromotive Force isn't a force because it doesn't have Newtons for units. EMF times charge does give a force but EMF alone is just Volts. In circuits we may think of it as if it's a force, and it has force in the name, but it's just a potential difference.
I think it is reckless. A lot of young up and coming engineers perhaps use sparkfun for their high school electronics work might read this and come away with incorrect understanding of things making new material confusing or longer to understand.
EMF is not a force and it's not the only thing the word electricity refers to. I've just checked a physics and an electrical engineering textbook and neither refer to electricity or EMF the way you are. I honestly don't know where you're getting these ideas.
In physics there is a fundamental force sosmetimes called The Electromagnetic Force, and in a sense it does describe all of electricity, but it's not the same thing as The Electromotive Force.
This article is not written for physicists, engineers, or anyone else so technically trained. If it were, it would read as follows: "Electricity is a vague term used to variously refer to the many aspects of electromagnetic phenomena."
If you want to keep that sentence, and cover your bases, you could reword as "the flow of electric charge, the potential to cause the same." And in any case, the escape clause already exists as "there’s so much behind that simple statement."
This is the basis for not agreeing? If it is, then it seems you drew an assumption then formed an opinon that is contrary to many college level courses, texts, and teachings I've sat through where electricity is carefully described as the force alone.
It's defining the term 'electricity', for a start.