Whats crazier is that in direct current individual electrons don’t travel at the speed of light through the conductor, but only at roughly 1cm/s.
Or, that thanks to the “skin effect” the current actualy travels in a very thin layer below the outside surface of cconductor. Most of the conductor doesn’t transfer power but only maintains the magnetic field to keep the current flowing.
The electrons don’t move very quickly either. And it’s current (amps = joules / second) times voltage (electric field potential difference) that delivers power.
Simplifying to a single harmonic (pure sine voltage source and a linear RLC load), you need to know the product of the voltage’s and current’s amplitude (in VA, voltamps) but also their power factor or cos φ, the cosine of phase beetween them. If the cosine is zero, it’s a purely reactive (L/C) load with a phase of ±90° and no power is consumed overall. If the cosine is negative, power is actually being generated by the device you’re measuring (for instance, old elevators and escalators with synchronous motors are actually delivering power into mains when enough people are travelling down).
The voltage(electrical equivalent of force) is what travels.
It’s analagous to pushing something away from you with a really really really long stick, then pulling it back again. The stick didn’t move much but you still affected something far away.
why is everyone in this thread telling me to imagine something
Because imagination is everything- probably Einstein
The microwave doesn’t heat your food, it just vibrates the water.
imagine a bicycle chain between two sprockets, if you crank it foward and back like 1 inch, over and over again, you can clearly transmit power without the chain links going much of anywhere
Shit, that’s an amazing analogy.
Imagine an old-timey saw with a lumberjack on each side, pulling it back and forth across the tree. The saw just goes back and forth, but effective work gets done.
The balls in the middle of newtons cradle don’t move either.
Newton’s cradle sounds like a kinky sex move, which is ironic since Newton was likely a virgin.
In certain kink circles, Newton’s cradle IS a kinky sex move!
Yeah. Sort of like holding two ends of a chain and dragging it back and forth. Even if the chain isn’t traveling the full length, it’s still moving and you could still extract power from the system if you attached something to the middle of the chain.
This is analogous to saying, the blades on a wind turbine don’t go anywhere, they simply spin, and yet power is created.
You’re just wiggling the saw back and forth, yet the log is eventually halved
The washing machine just spins left then right, left then right, and the clothes come out clean.
Ad on a DC system, the electrons move dozens of times slower than a person walking. They also don’t get anywhere, and power is still delivered.
It’s fun to calculate that from a socket to a light bulb it may take something close to a few hours for one electron to get to the bulb, but even then that’s an average. Some electrons don’t even get to the light bulb ever.
IMO, the more interesting thing is how they are all always moving at a large fraction of the speed of light, but over any large distance, they are that slow.
Things never cancel each other so well on the macroscopic world.
Hell of a lot of electrons coming out and going in though
when you touch something we never actually touch it is all just fields interacting all the way down
People are really just mobile energy nets holding other energy in. What if the fields of our energy nets directly influenced each other? Jk… unless…?
just the
tipfields
That movement is still energy
Build a circuit to make use of that et voilà
Friction makes heat. Same thing really
Theres a gnarly your mom joke in here somewhere
In an tidal earth system, the water doesn’t even go anywhere, it simply vibrates back and forth
