Hey Bill, Why're you picking on me? I'm just the messenger, here! Really,
I'm not making this stuff up. What I've said is what the entire scientific
community believes, and also virtually every electrical engineer who didn't
cheat on his college exams. Of course, you're entitled to believe whatever
you want, but you're definitely in the minority camp.
On the other hand, what you said is mostly correct, so maybe we're really
not that far apart. Generally speaking, current, whether it's wind, or water
spouting from a hose, is always a flow of some substance, whether it be
electrons, water molecules, air molecules, protons from the solar wind, or
whatever. But that's a definition made up by humans. Movement is not a real
substance, and neither is electric current. Current is an abstraction. Like
I said earlier, you can't weigh it on a scale, or hold it your hand, like
you can with real particles.
To be technically correct, an electric current is a description of the
magnetic field produced by the movement of charged particles. (One of James
Clerk Maxwell's famous four equations explains this relationship.) For
example, if you measure the plate current flowing from your HV power supply
through a copper wire into the plate cap of your 3-500Z linear amp, your
plate current meter is actually measuring the magnetic field caused by the
charges moving in the copper wire. And this is done without ever touching
the wire. Also, the copper wire itself is electrically neutral, which means
that inside it there's no excess of one kind of charge over the other.
Furthermore, you can't tell from the plate current measurement whether the
charges in the wire are positive charges moving up the wire, or negative
charges moving down the wire. That's why current is such a useful concept:
it doesn't require any knowledge of the sign of the charges creating it,
which means that it's just as valid a concept when you're dealing with PNP
junctions, protons from a particle accelerator, electrons emitted from a
vacuum tube cathode, or whatever.
73,
Jim W8ZR
> -----Original Message-----
> Subject: Re: [Amps] "Conventional" current flow
>
> Jim's post, reprinted in full below, is incomprehensible nonsense.
> Everyone but Jim knows what "current" is: The liquid-like movement of
particles such as
> water molecules, air molecules or electrons.
> For the life of me I do not understand why some people want to make things
more complex
> and obscure than they are. Science has always been the search for truth
except, apparently,
> when it comes to electricity.
> Ben Franklin made a mistake and we are still paying for it.
>
> Time to wise up, folks!
>
> 73, Bill W6WRT
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