What is Electricity? (1996)

I have always loved this site.

I wish there was a search engine that indexed only pages like these. Something that penalized pages with ads[1], and penalized larger sites. A search engine for the "personal" web.

[1]: Not that I'm actually opposed to ads. The trouble is the incentive of "more views = more money" leads to content farming, which is what has destroyed the usefulness of most search engines.

In elementary school I learned electricity is moving electrons and I understood.

In highschool I learned electricity is moving electrons, but more like peas in a straw and I understood.

In university I learned something about fields, and I have no idea what electricity is anymore.

I fell in love with electronics and radio, and got my ham license, based on a book that I swiped from my local library (https://www.amazon.com/Elements-radio-Prentice-Hall-industri...). It took a person step by step up through complexity, saying "this is good but it has this problem and the next step is to fix it with ...". But that was the 70's. Are there any books that take the same approach to today's electronics, and radio in particular?

Frankly, the latest stuff, with Q and god-knows what, leave me scratching my head.

What a great site, thanks for the link. I've sent every article on it to my kindle & now I've got some good bath time reading! :)

I find summary message at the end particularly enlightening.

> But if you ask what is electricity?, then all of the answers you'll find will just confuse you, and you'll never stop asking that question.

How do we discover that Mrs. McCave named all her sons Dave? How do we discover without a lifetime of study that electricity is not the right name?

Is it scientific method? Epistemology?

Perhaps the article misses a simple solution - ‘electricity’ might be better described as being a category, not a specific phenomenon.

>"Well, maybe we don't need to choose just one definition. Could we mix them? Could we let Electricity be an "elastic term?" Suppose we ignore all these contradictions and instead pretend that all of the above definitions are true. Below is the "clear" and "simple" description of electricity which results:

Electricity is quite simple: "electricity" is just the flowing motion of electricity! Electricity is a mysterious incomprehensible entity which is invisible and visible, both at the same time. Also, electricity is both a form of energy and a type of matter. Both. Electricity is a kind of low-frequency radio wave which is made of protons. It's a mysterious force which cannot be seen, and yet it looks like blue-white fire that arcs across the clouds. It moves forward at the speed of light... yet it sits and vibrates inside your AC cord without flowing forwards at all. It's totally weightless, yet it has a small weight. When electricity flows through a light bulb's filament, it gets changed entirely into light. Yet not one bit of electricity is ever used up by the light bulb, and all the electricity flows out of the filament and back down the other wire. College textbooks are full of electricity, yet they have no electric charge! Electricity is like sound waves, no no, it's just like wind, no, the electricity is like the air molecules. Electricity is like cars on a highway, no, the electricity is the speed of the cars, no, electricity is just like "traffic waves." Electricity is a class of phenomena ...a class of phenomena which can be stored in batteries! If you want to measure a quantity of electricity, what units should you use? Why Volts of electricity, of course. And also Coulombs of electricity. And Amperes of electricity. Watts of electricity and Joules, all at the same time. Yet "electricity" is definitely a class of phenomena; merely a type of event. Since we can't have an amount of an event, we can't really measure the quantity of electricity at all... right? Right? Heh heh.

Does my description above sound stupid and impossible? You're right. It is. The word "electricity" has contradictory meanings, and I'm trying to show what happens when we accept more than one meaning. Electricity is not both slow and fast at the same time. It is not both visible and invisible. And electricity isn't the flowing motion ...of electricity.

Instead, approximately ten separate things have the name "electricity."

PDS: Observation: You could say that there are little pixies, little faeries dancing in the wires, instead of electrons, volts or amps, and if you did so, the electricity could still work, and no one would be any wiser...

What Science has done, up until now, is that they have named different aspects, different attributes of electricity, and they have mathematically defined the relationship of many but not all possibilities of these attributes under many but not all possible circumstances...

What Science has not done, to date, however, is clearly explained what electricity actually is.

In other words, we don't have a microscope such that we can "see" electricity and precisely what's going on at the atomic level (or whichever levels of scale that electricity takes place at), that is, we cannot see the exact CAUSE, we can only use measuring devices to measure EFFECTS.

Everything in our Science, to date, is about the EFFECTS generated by electricity. But we are not one step closer to understanding it's TRUE CAUSE.

The idea that because a chemical reaction generates electricity, or a magnet moving across a wire (or wire moving across a magent) we understand it to be the CAUSE of electricity -- is not true.

That's because in order to get closer to understanding the CAUSE of electricity, we have to understand what every way of generating electricity -- has in common with every other way... Do we really understand that? Someone care to take a crack at explaining how a chemical reaction which generates electricity is like moving a magnet across a wire? And what do those two things have in common with charging a capacitor via a Van De Graaff generator?

They all generate "electrons"?

No!

The Van De Graaff generator generates electricity via friction, the wire via induced current, and the chemical reaction, how is that in any way similar to the other two?

You see, we have a lot to learn, if we're willing to remove this arbitrary all-too-convenient explanation word called the "electron" -- which serves as a place at which all reasoning stops...

The word "electron" in today's science is like "God" in yesterday's religions:

Question (to a priest of yesteryear): "So if God exists then who or what created God?"

Priest: "I'm sorry, God is presumed to self-exist, and presumed to be the ultimate authority, so we don't question that any further..."

Question (To a scientist of today): "OK, so if electrons exist and are the cause of electricity, then what are they, and how are they created?

Physicist: "I'm sorry, electrons are presumed to self-exist, presumed to be the cause of all electricity, beyond that, we don't question them or that they exist..."

But what if all of these electrons, which everyone claims exist... really do not exist?

We could call 'electrons' by other names: little pixies, little faeries, very small "magical elves" dancing in the wires, and it wouldn't change the EFFECTS of the electricity or the electrical circuit, but it wouldn't get us one step closer to a really deep understanding of what is really going on "down there", the true CAUSE...

Lists don't make such great HN submissions because there isn't much to discuss about them other than the lowest common denominator (or greatest common factor?) of the items on the list, which in this case is electricity—a pretty generic topic. It would be better to pick the most interesting article on the list and submit that instead, so that there's something more specific to discuss. Does anybody want to nominate one?

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...