<story><title>Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1989)</title><url>http://amasci.com/miscon/whyhard2.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>k__</author><text>I got it taught about 3 or 4 times, and every time I understood it less.&lt;p&gt;In middle school they told me, it&amp;#x27;s electrons moving at the speed of light through a conductor.&lt;p&gt;In high school they told me, no no, they don&amp;#x27;t move at the speed of light, just when one electron enters the conductor, another one on the other side will leave the conductor, like with peas in a straw. And this enter&amp;#x2F;leaf is at the speed of light.&lt;p&gt;At university they told me, no no, you got it all wrong, it&amp;#x27;s about the electro static and electro dynamic fields which stand orthogonal on each other and produce electro magnetic waves... what?!&lt;p&gt;I seriously have no idea anymore.</text></item><item><author>notalaser</author><text>I think more than half the time I spent earning my EE degree has been spent unlearning the intuitive (but wrong) things that I was liberally taught. I was fortunate enough to have an exceptional Physics teacher in high school, who managed to avoid a lot of the bullshit that less fortunate students were fed; sadly, I compensated that with some of my own (misguided) self-study.&lt;p&gt;This experience also taught me to actively mistrust &amp;quot;intuition&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;common sense&amp;quot;. Not that there isn&amp;#x27;t value in intuition (quite the contrary, it&amp;#x27;s priceless, from design to maintenance), but it&amp;#x27;s only useful when it rests on a solid theoretical foundation. &lt;i&gt;Prior&lt;/i&gt; to earning that foundation, it&amp;#x27;s nothing but a (very bad) shortcut that people take because they want to feel knowledgeable, but don&amp;#x27;t want to invest the effort of going through all that math mumbo jumbo.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notalaser</author><text>As far as circuits go, this is about the closest high school Physics gets to truth (and it&amp;#x27;s decently close, compared to how wrong it gets e.g. capacitors):&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In high school they told me, no no, they don&amp;#x27;t move at the speed of light, just when one electron enters the conductor, another one on the other side will leave the conductor, like with peas in a straw. And this enter&amp;#x2F;leaf is at the speed of light.&lt;p&gt;although &amp;quot;entering&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;exiting&amp;quot; the conductor isn&amp;#x27;t really a good description.&lt;p&gt;A better way to think about it is that &amp;quot;conductor&amp;quot; is really just slang for &amp;quot;material that has a bunch of free electrons and very little room for more&amp;quot;. This is the &amp;quot;sea of electrons&amp;quot; that Beaty talks about. It makes sense that, if all this sea flows &lt;i&gt;steadily&lt;/i&gt; (i.e. at the same rate throughout the conductor), forcing a change in the rate of flow in one part of the conductor will be felt almost immediately in another part of the conductor, no matter how distant, even if the flow itself is extremely slow.&lt;p&gt;(If you&amp;#x27;re thinking that this is only true if the &amp;quot;pipe&amp;quot; through which the &amp;quot;sea&amp;quot; flows is full, you&amp;#x27;re right, this is how free electrons behave in conductors; that&amp;#x27;s why Beaty insists that a good analogy for a conductor is &amp;quot;like a pipe which is already full of water&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; At university they told me, no no, you got it all wrong, it&amp;#x27;s about the electro static and electro dynamic fields which stand orthogonal on each other and produce electro magnetic waves... what?!&lt;p&gt;If they taught you &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt;, they are most definitely wrong, it sounds loosely like induction, but with two strange names instead of &amp;quot;electric&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;magnetic&amp;quot; :-).&lt;p&gt;This is a better description of the physical reality, and it does help you understand circuits better if you think about it, but not in a very &lt;i&gt;practical&lt;/i&gt; manner.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1989)</title><url>http://amasci.com/miscon/whyhard2.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>k__</author><text>I got it taught about 3 or 4 times, and every time I understood it less.&lt;p&gt;In middle school they told me, it&amp;#x27;s electrons moving at the speed of light through a conductor.&lt;p&gt;In high school they told me, no no, they don&amp;#x27;t move at the speed of light, just when one electron enters the conductor, another one on the other side will leave the conductor, like with peas in a straw. And this enter&amp;#x2F;leaf is at the speed of light.&lt;p&gt;At university they told me, no no, you got it all wrong, it&amp;#x27;s about the electro static and electro dynamic fields which stand orthogonal on each other and produce electro magnetic waves... what?!&lt;p&gt;I seriously have no idea anymore.</text></item><item><author>notalaser</author><text>I think more than half the time I spent earning my EE degree has been spent unlearning the intuitive (but wrong) things that I was liberally taught. I was fortunate enough to have an exceptional Physics teacher in high school, who managed to avoid a lot of the bullshit that less fortunate students were fed; sadly, I compensated that with some of my own (misguided) self-study.&lt;p&gt;This experience also taught me to actively mistrust &amp;quot;intuition&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;common sense&amp;quot;. Not that there isn&amp;#x27;t value in intuition (quite the contrary, it&amp;#x27;s priceless, from design to maintenance), but it&amp;#x27;s only useful when it rests on a solid theoretical foundation. &lt;i&gt;Prior&lt;/i&gt; to earning that foundation, it&amp;#x27;s nothing but a (very bad) shortcut that people take because they want to feel knowledgeable, but don&amp;#x27;t want to invest the effort of going through all that math mumbo jumbo.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>selimthegrim</author><text>Well someone fucked you up because current is defined as the flow of positive charges just like the electric field direction is defined as the action of a positive test charge. Thanks Ben (Franklin)</text></comment>