this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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This is minor one, but annoys me how comnmon this is: light is made out of litle packets of energy called photons.
Here is a good video on the topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=SDtAh9IwG-I (Too lazy didn't watch: Light is an electromagnetc wave and is is not quantized. Only the interactions between atoms and light are quantized)
I was under the impression that electromagnetic radiation is both a wave and a particle, and it's known as the "wave particle duality".
Waves only collapse into particles during an interaction with other particles.
The electrons are very much moving, even if at an incredibly slow pace of ~1cm/s. It's just that they push the electrons ahead of them which puch the ones in front of then, etc. which makes electricity so fast.
It is however somewhat true for AC because there the electrons just get pushed back and forth 50/60 times per second, making them more or less stay in place
Well they do move, but just incredibly slowly.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/350612/speed-of-electrons-in-a-wire
In DC they actually are moving, but it's something like a few millimeters per hour on average
Can confirm. Traffic is awful on the Beltway.
To be fair, electrical engineers make a living by ignoring Maxwell's equations and the real behavior of electricity (the analogy of electrons pushing each other to transmit energy is also wrong, just less wrong). At RF you can't ignore them, and RF engineering is often known as black magic.
"Light propagates like a wave and interacts like a particle"
huh, I thought quantization of light(or energy really) came from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle