Kind of like how a piston in an engine also kinda just “shakes about” (because of explosions or steam or whatever) and yet delivers a lot of power.
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.
That’s not so. The power flows at the speed of light in the wire, the elections move slowly
Hell of a lot of electrons coming out and going in though
It’s kind of shocking, after a lifetime of assuming electrons whiz through wires at the speed of light, to find out they move so slowly that the speed at which they move is referred to as “electron drift.”
Guess I’m in today’s lucky 10000
In an AC system, the pedastal fan in your bedroom is electromagnetically coupled to the turbine at the coal/gas/hydro/nuc power station. They instantly and directly influence each other, and they both are spinning in tandem like two wheels on a car connected by an axel. Slowing the rotation of the fan with your hand technically increases the torque of the turbine, if only by an immeasurably small amount.
Fun Fact: An improperly shielded (or old and deteriorating) fan can be influenced by stray electromagnetic radiation. They’ll pick up AM radio signals occasionally, creating an off tone in the fan noise that sounds like a person talking faintly on the other side of the fan.
AC motors are more powerful but also more noisy. You need that power in your kitchen mixer but you need quiet in a fan. Modern WC rooms now have a DC fan, old ones have the loud one.
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!
I knew it!
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.
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.
No, skin effect only occurs on higher frequencies. That is why coaxial cabel is invented. But then they realized the energy in coax transfers in a completely different way.
That’s why you don’t have one thick copper cable but multiple thin ones.
I’m far from an expert, but that’s usually just for flexibility of the cable as far as I understand. Power wires inside the walls are one thick copper wire (or rather three for live, neutral and ground)
Correct, solid copper bus bars are also common in certain applications.
why is everyone in this thread telling me to imagine something
Because imagination is everything- probably Einstein
So imagine a bus…
Does it leave every 21 frames?
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
when you touch something we never actually touch it is all just fields interacting all the way down
just the
tipfieldsPeople are really just mobile energy nets holding other energy in. What if the fields of our energy nets directly influenced each other? Jk… unless…?
My power company is charging me that much for nothing but vibes?!
They’re giving you excitations
Ooh, exciting!
Steam engine pistons also move back and forth less than a meter at a time, and still could push trains a million kilometers in the forward direction. It’s that they’re pushing right while moving right and left when moving left. That’s like when AC current and voltage are in phase, delivering positive net power. Meanwhile, something that pulls left when moving right is consuming power.
The microwave doesn’t heat your food, it just vibrates the water.
It’s just the one electron… Allegedly
Can you imagine being the guy who just, like, claps his hands together and kills the electron, snuffing out all existence
Mum says it’s my turn to use the electron!
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.
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.
