What if the black stuff at the end o f a “burnt out” fluorescent lightbulb is not burnt out, but is merely “full” ?

From your statement: “Let's define electrical current as the flow of electrons”: I voted: “From the negative terminal to the positive terminal.”

It’s interesting that the speed of signal transmission is determined not by the material of the conductor, but rather by the dialect constant of its insulator. When I worked in the supercomputer industry we insulated long wires with foam Teflon, which has a very low dialect constant, for fast transmission.

0-0

It's a trick question that switch is in the off position ,

I'm pretty sure that the current goes CCW but the smoke goes CW.

Ken

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
It's a trick question that switch is in the off position ,

That circle-x symbol is actually a lamp. Or a pizza.

Consider that the "X" load is an automobile horn. With a good battery and a working horn, the horn will blow, right? Well, if you reverse the wires, will it suck? (I had a radar tech in Labrador ask me that.)

flashgu

What’s the x in the circle represent?

This is the reason that after I learned what I learned in school, everything I knew and had done didn't make sense in a real world sense. Especially AC.

A couple decades later when I started working as an electrician, I had to throw away all the theory and "science" I'd been taught and just think about things in a practical way.

quote:

Originally posted by m1009:
What’s the x in the circle represent?

Well, since the symbol means lamp, I guess the 'x' represents a filament.

quote:

Originally posted by cas:
This is the reason that after I learned what I learned in school, everything I knew and had done didn't make sense in a real world sense. Especially AC.

A couple decades later when I started working as an electrician, I had to throw away all the theory and "science" I'd been taught and just think about things in a practical way.

It's all Ben's fault.

So now that we are talking about the behavior of electrons, what about sterile neutrinos??

quote:

Originally posted by m1009:
What’s the x in the circle represent?

It is meant to represent an incandescent light bulb as an indicator.



The symbol being used as a power supply is representing a single cell battery.



It does not have a switch or other means of turning it off, which means that motherf****r will be placed outside your bedroom window at the most inopportune time.

Yeah, I took electronics in undergrad, and they lost me for good when they told me that the convention was to write current flow in circuit diagrams as though it were positrons that were moving.

Maybe things have changed. Make that, hopefully things have changed.

Always chided my EE friends about that. At least in mechanical engineering, we didn't define the gravitational force as pushing things away from one another, or drag force as accelerating motion.

The answer is No. 2, electricity flows from the negative to the positive terminal (assuming the simple electron flow model). However, those who answered positive-to-negative can be forgiven for responding with what you were taught, and the way most every wiring diagram in the world depicts.

A couple centuries ago Ben Franklin flipped a coin (or was it a key) and decided that electrons go from the positive terminal to the negative. By the time physicists discovered that electrons are negatively-charged and are attracted to the positive terminal, countless electrical diagrams already depicted exactly the reverse.

In practice, it usually doesn't matter, as long as everyone is doing the same thing. So by convention we act like it's positrons flowing to the negative end. Only smug physicists know better.