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Comment by echoangle | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain why switching the names would be better? I don’t get it

Because what we call electricity is electrons moving. So it would make sense for electrons to have the electric charge.

Now we are in a weird situation where current flows from positive to negative, but electrons flow from negative to positive. It would be a lot more logical if the direction of the electrons was the direction of the current, but the name was arbitrarily decided before we knew what electrons were.

This seems to warrant an appreciation for the nuances of the electromagnetic field, electric potential, and that electron drift in a conductor isn't really the same as varying potentials in the electromagnetic field.

Electricity is generally defined as a flow of electrical charge(s). Nobody except scientists care to know which way the electrons went because we never run out of them.

Chemists building batteries might disagree with you. They have to understand which direction the electrons flow and which elements they are using have the free electrons to spare.

By definition, chemists are scientists.

I remember some messy conventions in electronics as a reason.

The conventional flow of current goes from positive terminal to negative. But electrons actually flow from negative terminal to positive.

By convention, electrical current flows in the direction of the movement of positive charge.

However, in the typical case, what's moving is electrons, which means the "current" is flowing in the opposite direction of the movement of the electrons. This is stupid and everyone hates it.

In addition to the sibling comments, I have a somewhat esoteric reason to wish that the signs of electric charge were reversed.

In the coordinate system of an atom, the nucleus is at the origin, 0, while the electrons are a positive distance from that core. 0 is not negative, obviously, but it's non-positive.

When terminology is concordant in this way, the topic is easier for a student to grasp. When discordant, harder.

There's little chance for this wart to be remedied, invalidating every paper written up to that point is a bit of a non-starter. But I dislike it nonetheless.

Also when you're learning organic chemistry, where you need to mentally push electrons around molecules which are diagrammed in a highly compressed notation, the negative charges add just a bit more to your working-memory load (which might've already been on edge of what you can handle without dropping something) until you've had enough practice to compile the patterns down.

Negating when you move electrons is just one more step, but so is negation within a complex expression in language or programming, and we do try to avoid piling that up.

Chemistry was my major, and I considered adding this very point, but wasn't sure I could do a good job of explaining what the problem is. You did a great job there ^_^. Yes: there are positive 'holes' that you push a negative number to and then subtract. This is entirely backward and adds considerable difficulty to an already difficult operation.

Because in an electrical current it is electrons that move (usually, unless you have a hydrogen plasma or something), so since electrons have a negative charge, the direction of the positive current is the opposite of the direction the electrons are flowing.

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