Embed this noticehazlin no plap pirate (hazlin@shortstacksran.ch)'s status on Monday, 23-Oct-2023 04:17:09 JST
hazlin no plap pirate"As far as elementary textbooks are concerned, we have no name for the thing which flows inside of wires. Yes it's true that this entity, whenever it is flowing, is properly called "an electrical current." But when the stuff *stops* flowing, what do we call it? It's still inside the wire of course. But it's not moving anymore. Refer to advanced physics texts, and there we'll find its correct name: Charge. An electric current is a flow of charge. Yet the K-6 books never mention this. Instead they say that "current flows." They say it over and over. And over! And any students are very lucky if they avoid picking up the wrong idea that the charges vanish when the flow is halted. (Does the water in a pipe suddenly evaporate when you halt its flow? No, and neither do the flowing charges within a metal wire. The "current" is gone, but the charges just stopped in place.)"
@WandererUber@hazlin I hate to say this but trying to teach physics to people that haven’t had calculus is kind of a waste of time. Newton invented calculus so he could have a language to describe physics. There is no escaping it.
@hazlin Elementary texts often simplify, or use bad analogies to the point where they are just plain wrong. Plus there is a lot of FUD out there in the form of YouTube essays by guys that got a B- in sophmore E&M.
You will need to know pain to achieve understanding.
@pinemarten@hazlin feel like college level electrodynamics is one field where the "wrong" fundamentals they teach up through highschool really impact understanding negatively. The math suddenly gets 10x harder and the actual physics are not explained at all to students
@pinemarten which is amazing, because in one of my books, it was talking about how well charge can flow inside of a wire is effected by the frequency of an AC signal. It went on to say, you need a special kind of wire that allows different frequencies to flow inside it. (I read that yesterday)
I've not kept a list, but the number of times a description of physical events has turned out to be highly erroneous grows every day.