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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.)
But that’s by design, while this is a convention problem
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.
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.
Damn time travelers,
alwaysnevermessing things up!
Man, this one is a good one.
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.
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.
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.
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
You just have to ignore the existence of electron flow.
And ignore magnetic fields completely?
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
You forgot science enthusiasts who are desperately trying to impress people.
They get lumped in with the lunatics
We don’t want 'em.
You mean the writers fpr “IFL Science”?
Yeah, we don’t want them. They’re idiots
Stupid meme sharing fuckers.
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.
“all models are wrong, but some are useful”
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.
Couldn’t you fix this by also defining electrons as positive? Imo the physicists and electrical engineers should fight it out.
All words are just made up.
The physicists are absolutely right. However, I reject their reality and substitute my own
That sounds like the electrical engineers I know
But then I get to talk about all those holes flowing.
Uhhhh…pornhub is that way ----->
I’m sure someone has uploaded some current diagrams…
Wait, no, but first, imagine marbles in a straw!
Pornhub is that way ----->
Imagine a chain getting tugged back and forth
Pervert.
Could someone explain what makes one pole negative/positive? Like, could we have named them Alice/Bob or is there a specific reason we went with +/-?
Since they are quite good opposites, the smart people who figured how all this worked decided on that and we stuck with it based on convention. Like how “Alice” and “Bob” were used in Computer Science since they are generic names beginning with the first two letters of the alphabet (it could have easily been any A and B name, but this is the convention!)
Similar can be said for magnets, the “North” and “South” poles are good opposites. If other people started the trend, we could have easily gotten something else, but this is the convention.
Another example, the use of “abc” and “xyz” in Mathematics. Or “ijk” as index variables when programming loops.
Guessing here, but +/- is good for describing them as binary opposites as that system already exists. This is a good thing assuming there are two types of charge/pole which behave in opposite ways (Eg move differently in a field). It’s also just good to use numbers so that we can describe the amount of + and the amount of -, which numbers already do. It also allows us to describe neutral as neither + nor -, but 0. Again, we already have a scaffold there for numbers and it’s easy to copy it for new things when that makes sense.
Magnets.
If there’s no field there’s 0, if there’s a magnetic field clockwise it makes a positive charge, if there’s a magnetic field rotating counterclockwise it makes a negative charge,
Likewise if there’s a positive charge it makes a clockwise magnetic field and if there’s a negative charge it makes a counter clockwise field. (I may be backwards +/- clockwise/counter clockwise, something about the thumb on my left hand…, but really it’s all arbitrarily named, but the reason you just say negative or positive is that those are scalable measures, you can’t have half a Bob or 2 Alice. )
There are situations where the charge carrier is positive (e.g. a positive ion flowing in a solution)
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?
True, but most of laws, equations etc still work and only specific fields need to adjust for this.
But then you have to flip from the left hand rule to the right hand rule!
Doesn’t matter in a lot of cases. Just state the flow direction and convention once and then stick with it.
I guess it would work much more often, but also not all currents are electrons flowing (Eg ions, holes arguably). I doubt the convention causes much trouble for people
