• Riverside@reddthat.comEnglish
    7·
    2 hours ago

    Currents aren’t drawn incorrectly. Electrons do move backwards, but since their electric charge is negative, the current goes the correct way.

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
    6·
    3 hours ago

    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.

    • RaoulDook@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      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.

  • suicidaleggroll@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    2 hours ago

    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.

    • Viceversa@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 minute ago

      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).

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    131·
    14 hours ago

    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.

    • Fedizen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 minutes ago

      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.

  • xthexder@l.sw0.comEnglish
    48·
    1 day ago

    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.

  • Console_Modder@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    123·
    2 days ago

    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

    • gazter@aussie.zoneEnglish
      4·
      14 hours ago

      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.

    • Arrkk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      14 hours ago

      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.

    • ch00f@lemmy.worldEnglish
      901·
      2 days ago

      You forgot science enthusiasts who are desperately trying to impress people.

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
      22·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • ThePyroPython@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      2 days ago

      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 asylum makerspace to takeover!

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        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.

    • MuskyMelon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      1 day ago

      You just have to ignore the existence of electron flow.

      And ignore magnetic fields completely?

      • vaionko@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        3·
        12 hours ago

        In a lot of cases, yes. 99% of the time when designing electronics / electrical circuits you can safle ignore them.

  • ThomasWilliams@lemmy.worldEnglish
    651·
    2 days ago

    The current does flow from positive to negative. Electricity is not the flow of electrons - they just generate the field that the electric wave flows through. The electrons don’t actually move very far. The wave flows outside of the wire, not in it.

    • Birds are not real@lemmy.worldEnglish
      215·
      1 day ago

      Electricity is not a real-concept, it is a qualitative aspect and the elec-root is what defines that aspect. There is no such thing as electricity, to cut it short, it’s like talking about “Science”. There is the scientific method, scientific advances, natural science which is a category of academic research, but science is a broad abuse of language, same thing goes for electricity when people picture “the blue stuff that flows in wires”, it’s reductive, ignorant and meaningless when you can talk about electrical arcs if you mean the “blue stuff”, electrical current, electrical charge, electrons if you refer to the subatomic particle allowing this exchange, electrical energy is the volts per coulombs, etc.

      But there is current and in direct current, those particles flow as historically, that was the first convention for current, AC operates through frequency oscillation. Also, electromotive force is what causes the movement of electrons, the magnetic field is just a componenent and does not induce EMR and the energy generated by it is akin to mechanical “work” caused by kinetic forces. It boggles my mind how even modern electrical engineers sometimes get this wrong.

        • Birds are not real@lemmy.worldEnglish
          25·
          14 hours ago

          Unless you can refute the below cited sources (which I doubt even I could despite teaching at the graduate and undergraduate level), I will assume you have just replied because of cognitive dissonance or lack of awareness of preconceived dogmas of how the dynamics of knowledge and linguistics work one with the other:

          1-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_electricity

          2-https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10728-012-0231-2

          Fun fact, the disconnect between true academic knowledge discoveries which are bound to a very strict code of ethics, do not apply to the common working man. This creates paradoxes everywhere, especially at the fundamental level and english, being a language not regulated by a linguistic body like French is by the Académie Française. It becomes even more interesting when looking at very old languages that still are able to function like arabic which is 3000 years old and has morphed into common domestic tongues for the most part but is regulated by the Majma’ al-Lugha al-'Arabiyya as a theological unified language in Cairo and Chinese which is 1800 years old and regulated by the Guójiā Yǔyán Wénzì Gōngzuò Wěiyuánhuì (National language commission, or 国家语言文字工作委员会 ) and has had a modernist revision which gave us mandarin or “Simplified” chinese, building onto older “Traditional” Chinese.

          • Wolf314159@startrek.websiteEnglish
            4·
            10 hours ago

            This reads like an LLM with a large vocabulary failing to understand the actual context of the conversation. Lots of big words hurled with reckless abandon, lacking any real meaning and having little to do with the actual point.

            • Mohamed@lemmy.caEnglish
              1·
              3 hours ago

              Not relevant to whats being discussed. I wish rather than delete the comment, mods are able to flag it as AI and users can choose whether to see AI posts or not.

              Random thought.

            • Warl0k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              7 hours ago

              Yeah most of their comments give me that “am I having a stroke” you get with LLM output. If they’re not a bot I have no idea what they’re saying, at any rate.

      • Omnipitaph@reddthat.comEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        I’m going to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever been confused when someone used the word “science” before, and it is usually pretty cut and dry what they mean when they use the word “science”.

        “The sciences” - Various fields of study using the scientific method. “Doing science” - Using the scientific method to explore some hypothesis or harden a theory. “Scientific advancements” - The furthering of knowledge using the scientific method.

        I would think most people feel that “science” is not an abuse of language, but a very clear and useful term, both in and outside of academia. At least with “science” it all revolves around the study of nature, usually through the scientific method. “Electricity” seems more like a vehicle, with parts that have to come together just right or you end up describing an entirely different phenomenon.

        “Electricity” as you’ve defined it, is fucking wacko, and does not parallel “science” in anyway I currently see. I’m not saying that you’re statement makes you wacko, but that the culmination of these esoteric concepts makes up what we think of as a broad categorization of “electricity” is wacko.

        Your explanation was really enlightening, actually, and while it took me a moment to acclimatize to the information, it was very helpful. Thank you.

        • Birds are not real@lemmy.worldEnglish
          14·
          16 hours ago

          Thank you for your reply. I’m new to Lemmy, and while replies like yours are why I’m still falling in love with it (since no platform has felt as representative of the human experience as Reddit before Helen Pao) it is a genuine pleasure to be met with careful intellectual consideration rather than misguided reductionism.

          To address your point: yes, it is true that there are alternative ways to describe the practice of human abstraction of the natural realm, or “Science” which is a word that will be met by scrutiny under any ethics review for a university paper but works perfectly well in the common and fun daily discussions of any intellectually curious human.

          Karl Popper is the one who perfected this for us, owing to the parallel contributions of two Jinns of knowledge who shook human and natural disciplines to their foundational assumptions: Einstein and Freud . Each published groundbreaking works using profoundly different methodologies. Popper, perhaps unintentionally—and arguably by mistake—brought this tension into sharp focus, setting in motion the philosophical move that ultimately negated Freud’s claim to scientific status and is now an (imo highly slanderous) general point of view that psychoanalysis has no merit and should therefore be discarded. By extension, this helped solidify a framework in which only certain forms of inquiry were deemed truly “scientific.” This, in turn, is why naturalistic physical abstraction and the echoes of scientism are now “painting the walls white” in every reflection of what we understand our world to be.

          I was initially drawn into this because I am male and a lover of all scientific knowledge—knowledge acquired through hypothesis synthesis, verification via empirically and statistically supported evidence, and peer review. I also practice and teach at a Canadian university, though I’d prefer not to leave identifying details online. My husband (a brilliant art historian and big advocate member of the LGBTQ+ community and reform of logically outdated concepts such as race, gender, work and others), had the insight to engage me in a careful, sustained dialogue debating and reflecting on every facet of my materialist worldview. Through this, it became easier to understand why societal mental health is in its current state, and why humans seem (at least to my eyes) less self-aware than in prior eras. It had also a profound effect in allowing me to understand so much of myself and only got better as I became more and more nuanced in how I abstracted upon thoughts. But it also kept being a friction point on linguistics and academic nomenclature and yes, I do still believe that the abuse of language often made by calling academic disciplines “Science” is why “common sense” and popular points of views have done such a disservice to “human sciences” (despite them not using the scientific method).

          This dialogue brought me to realize that the natural sciences are merely the tip of the iceberg, and that humanistic discourse plunges into far deeper waters. The journey has been mentally taxing, if I may share my lived experience, and I now feel a certain intellectual jealousy toward my husband’s discipline. I’ve come to believe that the humanities, scientism, and, by extension, the common abuse of language (such as treating “Science” as a monolithic entity) do a profound disservice to the second half of what it means to see the world as a human. Human and Natural sciences operate in a dichotomy after all and this is why the world can be interpreted as; There is everything outside of you, and then there is everything inside of you. The interior world remains a profound puzzle, one that still demands enormous focus. In my view, significant reforms in scientific methodology are urgently needed, especially as the dominant model has been a systemic impediment to disciplines like psychology and anthropology. And if I can pique your curiosity; below is a good paper on the issue if you happen to be tied to academic practice and if you are looking for a good challenge, natural sciences (in my eyes as I now get older and wiser) are total child’s play compared to how more robust and taxing humanities can be from a logical standpoint.

          https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368879558_Hoskins_1_Emerson_in_the_Digital_Age_The_Transcendent_Potential_of_Human_Nature

  • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.worldEnglish
    222·
    2 days ago

    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.)

  • j4yc33@piefed.socialEnglish
    212·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      14 hours ago

      I would even go as far as to say that models are neither right nor wrong, they just are what they are. Like a flower is not right or wrong for blooming a certain way, it just does what it does and does not care about your right and wrong. This is simply because there is no morality outside of human society and therefore no way to establish right or wrong.

      In fact, it is us who are right or wrong when we are using a model. We can use it in meaningful ways or nonsensical ways, it’s our choice. That’s why it’s us who are right or wrong.