Good evening! I am reading up on electricity just for the fun of it. I am still a complete beginner.

With that out of the way, I wonder: are electrons negatively charged inanimate objects, perhaps particles, or are they merely negative charge with no physical form? But perhaps without there being an object to exert charge there is no charge?

An other way of asking this question would to my beginner mind be: could we tag and track an individual electron as it flows - perhaps in a piece of copper without significant voltage so that the electron doesn’t rush away in the speed of light?

I guess I want to know this in order to understand whether electrons actually loop around in a closed DC circuit in the speed of light or are they just pushing the electron in front of them, creating a domino effect, not actually traveling very far?

Please excuse my incoherent formulation. It’s late at night where I am and of course these questions come to mind when I’m trying to sleep.

  • trailee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    23 hours ago

    I think you’re asking about free electron flow through a metal conductor which is way more complicated than you might like.

    It’s worth learning about atomic orbitals, which are basically probability distributions around an atomic nucleus where electrons can be found in various conditions. There are many different patterns of these distributions, which represent different energy states possible for the atom, and their complexity increases in larger atoms. Here’s hydrogen:

    Sometimes an electron transitions from a higher energy orbital to a lower one. Total energy is conserved, so the exact difference in energy levels between the orbitals is emitted as a photon of light. That photon has a very specific color (frequency) based on the difference in the energy levels of the transition. This is how neon signs work, with energy absorbed by the neon gas atoms and then very quickly emitted again as photons at the characteristic frequency.

    That idea leads into quantum energy levels, spectral lines of various materials, spectroscopy, and beyond, even into astronomy with Doppler shifts of spectra indicating our relative velocity to a given star and the spectra themselves indicating the elemental composition of the star. But I’m getting off track.

    A solid metal is mostly a 3 dimensional crystalline lattice of metal ions and a collection of delocalized electrons that can freely flow throughout the lattice. Another way to think of it is a lattice of atoms that collectively have an enormous shared valance electron orbital throughout which free electrons can move without transitioning energy states. That freedom to move is what makes them delocalized.

    Note that each atom/ion only contributes one electron to the free pool. For example, Copper has 29 protons, which means it needs 29 electrons to be neutrally charged. In a copper metal lattice, each ion will still have 28 electrons bound up in its lower orbitals, and they won’t be participating in any electrical current flow through the metal.

    This chemistry chapter attempts to explain that, and then goes on to give some very specific answers about the speed of electrons moving through your DC circuit.

  • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
    01·
    2 days ago

    are they merely negative charge with no physical form?

    Charge is a property of a particle. You can’t have charge with no physical form.

    Whether electrons zoom or bump or flow depends on how closely you look. The best answer, without several courses of physics, is just don’t worry about it, you apply charge to a wire and it conducts. The short “real” answer is that electrons kind of move like a gas along the conductor.