Re:Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1989)
by alisonkisk on Saturday March 06, 2021 @09:07AM
(#26367433)
Sound : AC (maybe? Not sure.)
Wind : DC
Air : conductor
Re:Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1989)
by fallingfrog on Saturday March 06, 2021 @10:14AM
(#26367894)
I think in this analogy, sound is more like voltage in the sense that voltage is like pressure: it’s a measure of potential per electron or force per air molecule. And when you push on the electrons at one end of a wire, that pressure change rapidly propagates to the other end of the wire even without the electrons moving. Like the way sound doesn’t involve air molecules flowing from place to place but is a pressure wave.
Wind is like electrical current in the sense that you set up a pressure difference between one point and another, and then you open up a little path for the electrons/air molecules to flow through, then they will move along that path, and the amount of air molecules/electrons flowing past a point per second is the current/wind. That’s the analogy.
> ...mistaking the wave for the medium. Is "electricity" the electrons, or is it the wave of electron-flow, or is it energy that flows THROUGH a column of electrons. Think of how difficult it would be to understand sound waves and air pressure if we had just a single word that meant both "sound" and "wind" and "air."