4 ms·

I think your suggestion has much merit, though I think the positive/negative thing may have value due to coincidentally lining up with the math used to describe

I think your suggestion has much merit, though I think the positive/negative thing may have value due to coincidentally lining up with the math used to describe the forces that act on those particles. Though 'protonic terminal is positive, electronic is negative' isn't any more difficult or arbitrary.

shadowgovt 2y ago
I used to have this memorized and I've lost the details... So Benjamin Franklin established the standard for charges being positive and negative (based on a theory he was operating under that electricity was a fluid that flowed from place to place, and too much fluid was a positive charge and too little was a negative charge). He declared that glass rubbed by cloth was positive and the charge from rubbing fur or rubber was negative, and we were off to the races. (Worth noting: something I picked up while trying to reboot my memory on this is that from an electrical engineering standpoint, it's actually not super-useful to think about current as "flowing electrons" unless you're dealing very specifically with a situation where electrons are jumping through air or a vacuum and it matters. In a battery, the flow is ions; in a hydrogen fuel cell, the flow is protons; in wires, sure, the flow is electrons, but the fact that what's really moving around and causes phenomena is charge concentration matters and, conveniently, conceptually covers all these cases, and as long as your concept of charge concentration is consistent it doesn't matter if you're considering the concentration to equalize by flowing from positive to negative or negative to positive, there's a symmetry to charge density minimization.)
- burnished 2y ago
  That is my understanding as well regarding the path here. That is a good point, but, it would still be really nice if the convention for current just so happened to match the flow of electrons through a wire since it is the common case. At least, I remember that being pretty disorienting for me at times in some electrical engineering classes. Wish I could remember something specific though! Do appreciate you pointing out some counter examples though, always fun.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    It definitely matters when you start actually caring about electrons leaping through space over long distances. Like... You'll get the wrong answer if you think the electrons in a CRT go from the screen to the gun, or if it's positively-charged particles that are causing carbon deposition inside a vacuum tube. But that actually turns out to be (for most people) a specialized context. I'm startled to discover (because I was in the same camp as you) that the math is so symmetrical that it really almost never matters how the physical charge-carriers are moving, since it's the change in electric field that is causing things to happen.

shadowgovt 2y ago

I used to have this memorized and I've lost the details... So Benjamin Franklin established the standard for charges being positive and negative (based on a theory he was operating under that electricity was a fluid that flowed from place to place, and too much fluid was a positive charge and too little was a negative charge). He declared that glass rubbed by cloth was positive and the charge from rubbing fur or rubber was negative, and we were off to the races. (Worth noting: something I picked up while trying to reboot my memory on this is that from an electrical engineering standpoint, it's actually not super-useful to think about current as "flowing electrons" unless you're dealing very specifically with a situation where electrons are jumping through air or a vacuum and it matters. In a battery, the flow is ions; in a hydrogen fuel cell, the flow is protons; in wires, sure, the flow is electrons, but the fact that what's really moving around and causes phenomena is charge concentration matters and, conveniently, conceptually covers all these cases, and as long as your concept of charge concentration is consistent it doesn't matter if you're considering the concentration to equalize by flowing from positive to negative or negative to positive, there's a symmetry to charge density minimization.)

burnished 2y ago
That is my understanding as well regarding the path here. That is a good point, but, it would still be really nice if the convention for current just so happened to match the flow of electrons through a wire since it is the common case. At least, I remember that being pretty disorienting for me at times in some electrical engineering classes. Wish I could remember something specific though! Do appreciate you pointing out some counter examples though, always fun.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  It definitely matters when you start actually caring about electrons leaping through space over long distances. Like... You'll get the wrong answer if you think the electrons in a CRT go from the screen to the gun, or if it's positively-charged particles that are causing carbon deposition inside a vacuum tube. But that actually turns out to be (for most people) a specialized context. I'm startled to discover (because I was in the same camp as you) that the math is so symmetrical that it really almost never matters how the physical charge-carriers are moving, since it's the change in electric field that is causing things to happen.