5 ms·
Reading this, I think I might have been confused about some of these concepts as well. But I had a hard time explaining them to myself. I wonder, is there any
by bozzcl 6y ago
Reading this, I think I might have been confused about some of these concepts as well. But I had a hard time explaining them to myself.
I wonder, is there any resource online that explains electricity properly in a "for dummies" way? I'd be interested in going through it and seeing what surprises me.
- frongpik 6y agoThis article is pretty good. A short summary is that electricity is like a sound wave propagating thru a sea of electrons or protons or something charged. This is however the tip of the iceberg. The real mystery is how those electrons and protons feel each other. They don't bump into each other like atoms in the air, they interact via magnetic field - a mysterious medium that magically appears around charged particles and alters their trajectories. It's the same magnetic field that surrounds bar magnets. Rumors are magnetic field is made of photons, but nobody has been able to see or catch those photons, so they have been renamed into virtual photons. Those special photons don't really exist, but still interact with charges.
- Robotbeat 6y agoMagnetic field can be derived from electrostatic effects and special relativistic effects. That sounds complicated but both are sophomore level concepts. Sure, the electromagnetic force is mediated by photons, but you don’t need that piece of (graduate-level) knowledge to understand magnetism.
- kharak 6y agoI personally absolutely need that piece of information. I have a simple assumption about the material universe. All interactions rely on touch. Atoms or their sub-particles don't magically interact with each other over a distance. That's why I still don't understand gravitation, at all. I don't care that we can calculate something. That doesn't tell me what is actually happening.
- shawnz 6y agoIn a classical sense, no interactions rely on touch and atoms only interact with each other over a distance.
- vkou 6y ago> This is however the tip of the iceberg. The real mystery is how those electrons and protons feel each other. Is it any more mysterious then how our planet 'feels' the presence of the Sun, through the gravitational force, despite being 150,000,000 kilometers away?
- awakeasleep 6y agoDo you consider the mechanism through which gravitational effects propagate mundane?
- vkou 6y agoI mean, it is a magical field that seems to surround every single observable object (and some otherwise unobservable ones) that propagates at the speed of light. On that scale of weird, magnetism is not particularly special.
- frongpik 6y agoThe two are very similar in this regard.
- zepolen 6y agoJust think of electricity of water flowing through a pipe. All the concepts are exactly the same. Electrons = Water molecules Battery = Water tank Wire = Pipe Load = Water mill Voltage difference = How high tank is from water mill Amps = Amount of water molecules flowing through pipe Resistor = Pipe with sand
- globular-toast 6y agoI don't think voltage is adequately explained like that. It doesn't matter how high a tank of water is, the force pushing it down is exactly the same. I think instead you need to use a pump which can vary the pressure.
- leoedin 6y agoThe pressure of water at the bottom of a pipe is directly related to the height of the pipe (the term used is "head"). A higher tank means higher pressure.
- alisonkisk 6y agoThe height of the pump increases the distance that the force will do work over (or how much kinetic energy the force will impart to a molecule), akin to how voltage will impart kinetic energy to the electron. Potential energy due to gravity is mgh. A pump adds more force to g. A tower increases h. What's nice about the pump is that it removes the special spatial directionality of gravity. In electricity, Earth is a voltage point-of- reference but not a spatial directional reference for computing forces.
- alisonkisk 6y agoOne important difference is that for water we have gravity which is geographically directional at earthly human scales. So "high up" isn't as intuitively visualizable for electric circuits, unless you carefully arrange components so that distance is correlated to voltage.
- zokier 6y agoThe problem I have with this sort of popular water analogy is that I don't really have any better intuition on hydraulics or fluid mechanics than I have on electronics. Maybe this has been different in the past when the water analogy was introduced, but I don't see it being very useful at least today.