Re:Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1989)
by OkayPhysicist on Saturday March 06, 2021 @11:49AM
(#26368620)
No, this is the whole "confusing the wave and the medium" problem. Drift velocity (the technical name for "how fast are electrons moving through this wire") has effectively nothing at all to do with the propagation of electrical properties through a circuit.
If electrical properties propagated at the drift velocity, there'd be an appreciable delay when you flipped your light switch.
Each electron moves slowly, but they all move approximately in the same direction st the same time, so the net effect is to move charge berry quickly, right?
Like a bucket brigade where everyone passes water to the person on their left. You move a bucket 3 feet per second, but together everyone moves a bucket worth of water a hundred feet per second.