Silly question about voltage and current

[TinselKoala]

That's right. Like charges repel, and this is the _source_ of what we call voltage. Pack a bunch of like charges together and they will repel with more force the more charges you pack in there. This is voltage.  Provide a path for the charges to relieve this pressure, and they will flow along the path until the charge pressure is equal everywhere. This flow of charge is current.  Charge is carried by free electrons, which carry the unit negative charge, and also by "holes" which are places where an electron "should" be in a molecular lattice, as in semiconductors. "Holes" are positively charged, electrons negatively charged. Because of the naming convention assigned originally by Benjamin Franklin, the electrons are called negative. This is somewhat unfortunate, because what we call "conventional" current is taken to flow from positive voltage regions to more negative regions... but the actual flow of electron charges is in the other direction, from the packed "negative" voltage region full of electrons and depleted of holes, over to the more positive voltage region, which is deficient in electrons and has a surfeit of "holes". This was not known in Franklin's time, though, and by the time the electron was actually characterized by several researchers like JJ Thomson and Robert Millikan in the years around the turn of the 20th century, we were stuck with Franklin's "negative" terminology.

[Pirate88179]

"I am dead serious you do not even understand 0.0000000001% of this whole thing."

(Quoted from Turbo's PM) 

Wow! 

Check out the sig. digits here.  I wonder how this was calculated?  10 places...not 9...not 6...not 3...but 10.

If it were me, I would have went 11 places out, just to be sure I got my point across.  12, of course, would have been overkill, but 11 would have done the job well.

Bill

[TinselKoala]

Yeah, precision is important. Well, I guess it's time... or maybe NO time... to go out and feed my herd of invisible pigs. There are at least ten thousand of them in the back yard. I'm not sure how many, really. Have you ever tried to count invisible pigs? It's not easy. But it beats making Ainslie debunk videos, there's no percentage in those.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg2_yE5dEQg

[dieter]

Dieter:

Sorry, but you are not even close.  The difference in height of the river from some starting point A to some ending point B would be like the voltage.  Voltage = height.   The amount of water flow in cubic meters per second would be be like the current. ...

MileHigh

MileHigh, old sceptic I was starting to miss you. Not even close? Well, the speed of flow is determined by the height diffrence you mentioned, so you agree with me.


As for the cubic meter per second, that my friend, would be Watt and not Ampere, as you said so eloquently. 

[MarkE]

MileHigh, old sceptic I was starting to miss you. Not even close? Well, the speed of flow is determined by the height diffrence you mentioned, so you agree with me.


As for the cubic meter per second, that my friend, would be Watt and not Ampere, as you said so eloquently. 

No: the fluid flow rate is equivalent to electric current.  The applied or lost power is the product of force and flow rate.  The force is the result of the height change, the mass and the acceleration due to gravity.