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So, it doesn’t actually change anything; everything still works the same.
But textbooks need to be thrown away and remade, every circuit diagram, every electrical engineering plan, decades of research and research papers have to be combed and corrected, or accept that they’re wrong.
While technically possible, it would create colossal risk and unending chaos and It’s environmentally unsound, for something that doesn’t change anything in the end.
Lazy is not checking your mail.
Refusing to turn reality on its head for a null change in the end is something else entirely.
Refusing to turn reality on its head for a null change in the end is something else entirely.
I do agree with you, just want to give voice to the other side of this. Don’t underestimate just how much of a barrier this confusion is in teaching. It’s confusing. Students who are new to electricity almost universally hate this, and in some cases it can cause misunderstanding, miscommunications, etc. There is a genuine cost to this mislabeling, and there would have been effectively no cost if electrons’ charge was considered positive instead of negative.
As I said, I do agree that in practice, with all the existing knowledge, writings and technologies that all agree that electrons are negative, it would be a global disaster if the labeling was switched. There’s no question about it. But I kind of disagree about “null change”, it’s true that it wouldn’t change what we can create or (almost) any of our equations, but it absolutely would make it easier to teach it to future generations.
My electronics teacher weathered it pretty well.
This is a basic circuit. These are how the electric and magnetic fields work. Oh and Franklin fucked up a long time ago, made a guess, and he guessed wrong. So, realistically, electrons flow from negative to positive, and the holes they leave behind flow from positive to negative. (he had already covered PN junctions so it scanned) It doesn’t change the math or anything, just know that electron flow is negative to positive and that’s the last you’ll hear of it. And we all said that’s dumb. And now, in my life, this is like the 5rd time I’ve talked about it since I learned it in 1992.
They don’t have to remake the textbooks in some cases - I’ve seen electronics (college) textbooks that were printed in 2 different versions for Electron Flow and Hole Flow.
Most circuit diagrams do not draw current flowing in any direction at all. It’s just labeled + and -. I don’t see anything wrong with this.
Logically the switch comes before the bulb.
That depends, do you want high or a low side switch? There are valid reasons for either depending on what you’re doing.
One that is less likely to kill me. Low side switches leave a “floating” load at the supply voltage that could leak to ground
I’ve left a floating load that leaked to the ground before.
I’m confused are you saying that negative voltage is more deadly than negative voltage? Just because electrons flow from negative to positive doesn’t mean it’s any more dangerous what moves the electrons is the voltage potential. If you were able to have electrons flow from a source through you to the ground your just as able to have electrons flow from the ground through you to a positive voltage source.
They just don’t know what they’re talking about. Mistook it for AC, where one usually wants the switch on the phase side.
You sent me down a rabbit hole wondering if AC batteries are a thing, and apparently they are! I’m still not sure if any of the sources I found are scams, but they seem to be physically plausible. Interesting!
there are no ac batteries by definiton
I don’t see any mosfets here
I’m saying there is more shock risk…
Switching the low side can also be dangerous in high-energy systems because the live conductor is always in circuit even when the unit is switched off. Switching in the high side ensures power is removed when the unit is switched off.
But the current doesn’t care
Current propagates at the speed of light in the conductor. It really doesn’t matter which side the switch is on at human timescales
The convention puts them on the positive side; people who understand the convention is [mostly] wrong put it on the negative side, but it doesn’t matter
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Eh, i’ve struggled with this for years but eventually found my peace.
You see, there’s two types of electric current: Electrons moving through a wire, and protons moving through water (the second one is also called a pH gradient, it happens e.g. in cell membranes of chloroplasts, fascinating stuff, check it out).
Basically plants do photosynthesis, which is extremely similar to what solar panels do. They generate an electric current, and in that current, positive charges move, so the “direction of current flow” is the correct one.
I have come to accept that the current inside living beings is more important than the current in all the machinery, because without life there would be no machinery, so life deserves to get the “correct” current.
This is such a good view of it that it also makes the professors I had that make the joke about it going backwards seem silly.
A lot of the old experiments on electricity were done with like paper dipped in salt water so of course physicists would lean towards defining it this way.
Currents aren’t drawn incorrectly. Electrons do move backwards, but since their electric charge is negative, the current goes the correct way.
OMG-O-S-H every circuit designed with conventional current just exploded because of your revelation here.
/s
My friend, this is the same branch of science that got us to space with calculations assuming spherical cows.
While we’re at it, is a compass needle’s North pole actually a South so that it points North? Or is the Earth’s North pole actually South so that the needle’s North pole points to it?
(I know that I could look this up, I just want to confuse people.)
The needle used to be called the north seeking needle. It is magnetically south
But that’s by design, while this is a convention problem
We decided on North long before we discovered magnetism. But the magnet poles of the earth flip from time to time so ehhh.
Current is defined as the flow of positive charge. The fact that electrons, which are negatively charged, actually flow the opposite direction is irrelevant. The diagrams are still correct per the definition of current.
Current is defined as the flow of positive charge.
No.
electric current, any movement of electric charge carriers, such as subatomic charged particles (e.g., electrons having negative charge, protons having positive charge), ions (atoms that have lost or gained one or more electrons), or holes (electron deficiencies that may be thought of as positive particles).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_current
The conventional direction of current, also known as conventional current,[10][11] is arbitrarily defined as the direction in which positive charges flow.
I was addressing a different part of your comment. See quote.
feels like this should be a skeletor quote!
I prefer a version of that meme with She-Ra in the photo
Not if I lift up the wire
so like, on my old car stereo system, the positive was actually coming through the frame of the car? scrape a little spot under the bolt of a seat?
It’s not that hard. this is a skill issue, OP.
Please do not vote or have children.You are a dipshit
*toxic dipshit.
Turns out Benjamin Franklin had it right, and it was this time traveler that caused him to flip it to the wrong direction.
While funny, this doesn’t work because the time traveler told him specifically which one is negative.
“… Well now I’m not going to do it.”
Damn time travelers,
alwaysnevermessing things up!
IMHO Franklin is one of the few who would go straight to “what is it?” without blinking.
The comic accurately portrays him as nude
Always love their comics but since I don’t know crap about this stuff it’s amusing to see how this one is relevant to a meme. Wish I knew more but only so much I’ve learned so far. One day perhaps but not today.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
The contributors on this site do an excellent job explaining the comics. Not really ELI5, but more ELI15.
It’s okay to not understand every comic, someone else out there figured it out and explained it to us.
Very much appreciated, thank you I’ll never understand everything but I’d at least like to have a bit of an idea.of what I can.
Man, this one is a good one.
You just have to ignore the existence of electron flow. Conventional current flow is all that matters, and the only people who use electron flow are those who design integrated circuits and lunatics
Are you implying that there are IC designers who aren’t lunatics?
I gave up on thinking about it (at least, DC) as flow, and started thinking about it as pressure. It’s a small mental flip that made a bunch of things easier. I’ve also heard people talk about it as the movement of holes where electrons are not.
Also chemists doing electrochemistry where the direction of electron flow is very important. You also have to deal with anode and cathode being flipped from how you expect since you are putting current in instead of taking current out.
You just have to ignore the existence of electron flow.
And ignore magnetic fields completely?
In a lot of cases, yes. 99% of the time when designing electronics / electrical circuits you can safle ignore them.
I was joking. But it does matter more with analog circuits.
You forgot science enthusiasts who are desperately trying to impress people.
You mean the writers for “IFL Science”?
Yeah, we don’t want them. They’re idiots
Stupid meme sharing fuckers.
They get lumped in with the lunatics
We don’t want 'em.
You mean to tell me that there are people out there whose job it is to design lunatics?
That’s fucking awesome. Like a real-life comic book author.
Let’s eat grandma
Depends on what she tastes like.
Wolfie will know!
It’s also useful to think of the “ground” plane as a sort of well of potential charger carriers that the conventional current model overlooks. Aside from simultaneously visualising what’s happening inside simple ICs like BJTs / MOSFETs and the circuit diagrams I’ve found it a useful way for checking for common mode noise in circuit and PCB design.
I guess this makes me a lunatic? Don’t know until we test it;
Someone give me an
asylummakerspace to takeover!It’s also useful to think of the “ground” plane as a sort of well of potential charger carriers
I…think I understand ground loops (audio) now.
And that’s why we have positrons instead of the much-cooler-sounding negatrons.
Man, they have positrons and negatrons now? The Transformers franchise is wild.
We gotta keep them out of sports, they are too strong.
The south^of Cybertron^ will rise again?
Oddly when it came time to negotiations, they somehow realized actually calling yourself a Decepticon, was not a good name for inspiring trust.
For some reason every Negatron in the last Michael Bay movie was black.
I have a feeling that in antimatter circuits the positrons would move the same way as the electrons in equivalent matter circuits
Well sure. And in that universe, electrons might be called negatrons.
