Heh, link to my website and I may suddenly appear.
I had previously sort of equated the EM field produced by the electrons to the Energy. In my head I was basically thinking "EM Field is analogous to THE electric energy."
That's right. The energy in electric circuits is always wave-energy, EM energy. It can race along the columns of mobile charge within a conductor, where the charge is the "medium" for the propagating wave-energy. But it can also leap across the gap between transformer coils or capacitor plates. In general, in simple circuits, the energy travels 'instantly' along
both halves of a circuit, along the two wires leading to a distant load. In a flashlight, the energy comes out of both battery terminals, races along the two connecting wires, and dives into the light bulb. At the same time, the movable charges within the conductors all move as a unit, turning either CW or CCW like a slow wheel or drive belt.
The above may seem weird, but it's very common in non-electrical systems as well as electrical.
For example, when you yank on a steel chain, each link in the chain moves towards you fairly slowly, while the mechanical energy flys out to the end of the chain at a few thousand KPH. The steel and the energy moved in opposite directions. Or, when you blow into a hose, the air in the hose moves slowly, but the pulse flys to the far end of the hose at roughly 1200KPH, the speed of sound. If you spin a flywheel by hand, mechanical energy comes out of your hand and spreads to fill the wheel instantly, even while the rim of the wheel turns slowly in a circle. Or the classic example: with a row of billiard balls, if you push on the first ball, the last ball in line moves almost instantly, since the energy traveled along the row of balls at the speed of sound (the speed of sound in wood.)
The article I read said this "Electric energy can even flow in a direction opposite to that of the electric current.
Elsewhere in those articles I introduce the "wheel analogy" for the movable charges within electric circuits. The charges inside a simple electric circuit act like a single object, so a simple circuit is like a bicycle wheel. If you grab the rubber tire and force it to rotate, then energy flys out of your hand and all along the rubber, causing the whole wheel to move as a unit. Note that the energy flys both directions out of your hand, spreading outwards through the wheel both upstream and downstream. And, if you drag your thumb against any part of the moving wheel, your thumb pulls in energy from the entire wheel, converting it to frictional heat. The same thing happens in electric circuits, because the entire circuit is already full of movable charge, and the loop of charges behaves much like a solid ring-shaped object. If a charge-pump (battery) in the circuit should force the charges at one point to move, then the charges in the entire circuit must move too. Or, if a light bulb or other 'frictional' load is placed in the circuit, it extracts energy from the entire circuit as a whole. It's as if the charges inside the circle of wire were acting like a long, long piston. But it's a piston which curves around to meet itself in a closed loop.
The other questions I posed in that paragraph are things I am definitely confused about and it would be a great help if you could address them directly. Here is is again:
1) Does our simple circuit actually run backwards (sort of)?
2) Does the light actually light up from (-) side to (+) side, generally speaking?
3) If we made the simple circuit slightly more complex and added a diode on the negative side of the circuit (forward bias like normal) how do the electrons / energy pass through the diode to light the light?
4) The example I have described is how it would be done in real life and it follows the water/pipe analogy. It is set up with the assumption that current begins to flow from positive to negative. Are diodes & all other components sort of "secretly" designed opposite the normal positive to negative design
1) Yes and no, since the direction of charges depends on the type of conductor, and copper isn't the only conductor present.
But more important, if a student asks about the real direction of flow, it might mean that they're using the incorrect "hollow pipes" concept, and wanting to follow the charges from the beginning. (There is no beginning, it's a wheel.) Or, they may be asking which component injects the charges into the "empty" wires. No component does this; the entire circuit is already full of movable electric charge. The circuit is
made of movable electric charge. That's the physics definition of "conductor," after all. All of the "electricity pipes" came pre-filled with movable charge. The "wheel" was already there.
I did some more reading between the time I wrote those questions and the time you responded. From what I gathered, it sounds like circuit diagrams and schematics are depicted based on Conventional Current as opposed to Electron flow.
Yes, circuits are based on electric current or Amperes. Current & amps is also called 'Conventional Current.' Electron flow is not electric current, because electric current is an abstract concept, a concept which intentionally conceals the charge speed, charge polarity, and charge quantity.
Specifically:
1. A dense cloud of charges moving slow can have the exact same Amperes as a sparse cloud moving fast.
2. A cloud of positive charges moving left, passing through a cloud of negative charges moving right, gives a single Ampere reading, not two.
3. Charges flowing from a thick wire into a thin wire will greatly increase speed, yet the amperes remains unchanged.
And this means, when dealing with amperes...
1. The number of charges is irrelevant
2. The polarity and direction of charges is irrelevant
3. The speed of charges is irrelevant.
Instead, all the above is combined together to give a single number: "Electric current" or "Amperes," (otherwise known as Conventional Current, the thing measured by all ammeters.)
Trouble is, usually we're asked to learn this stuff by osmosis, rather than having it explicitly explained. Also, we're supposed to learn the simplified abstract "Amperes" without first meeting up with the complicated real-world phenomena behind the curtain. For example, what would an electric circuit look like, if all of the hidden stuff could be made visible?
2) The whole filament lights up at once. Similar question: if several thumbs were rubbing on a drive-belt, and the belt suddenly started up, would one thumb heat up first? No, but perhaps the thumbs on the ends of the series-of-thumbs would heat up first, stretching the belt and slightly delaying the wave of mechanical energy. Then the thumbs in the middle would heat up as their portion of the belt started moving too. Electric circuits do the same. To detect the turn-on, instead of a light bulb, use a string of diode-lasers with nanosecond turn-on time. When we close the switch, which laser turns on first? The one on the positive end, or the one on the negative? Neither.
Probably both ends start at the same time ...but it depends on the location of the power switch!
3) Diode in the circuit. The diode symbol shows the Amperes polarity for forward bias. A turned-on diode is a conductor, so
electrical energy can propagate past it in either direction. But inside a PN semiconductor diode we have positive and negative carriers flowing in opposite directions. In one spot the opposite carriers fall together and annihilate, giving off heat and IR radiation, and leaving neutral crystal atoms. At another spot the positives and negatives are pulled out of the crystal atoms and forced to flow in opposite directions, almost like antimatter "pair production" in high-energy physics. Where this charge-sep occurs, heat-vibrations are absorbed, and that spot in the crystal grows cold.
4) Diode design. There are semiconductor diodes, hot-filament vacuum diodes, gas-discharge diodes (mercury rectifiers,) and even crude electromagnet biased-coil diodes and electrolysis diodes from the late 1800s. All have the same symbol in a schematic, and all behave roughly the same. There is no "backwards" unless we reject the abstract idea called "Amperes" and drill down into the level of description called Component Physics. And in that case, the answer depends on the type of diode. Electrolytic diodes have simultaneous positive and negative flows in opposite directions the same conductor! This isn't too far from semiconductor diodes, with opposite carriers flowing together to vanish at the junction in tiny bursts of light.
But my question was asking why the positive ions dont also move toward the electrons.. aren't they also attracted to their opposite charge?
Yes, in lead-acid batteries the positive ions move to meet the incoming electrons. Positive ions in the electrolyte move to the metal plate, where they meet incoming electrons and cancel out. Actually, with acid-type batteries, these "positive ions" are H+ ions, hydrogen atoms with an electron missing. Which means, they're bare protons. Cool, eh? All acids fall under the class called "Proton Conductors." So, wouldn't the protons and electrons form hydrogen gas as they come together? Yep, that's where those H2 bubbles come from. (But in car batteries the dissolved sulfate gives up oxygen, forming water with the protons and incoming electrons. So, no bubbles under normal discharge conditions.)
But that's actually answering a different question. Before the battery is connected, the electrolysis has removed electrons from the positive plate and also the positive terminal, exposing metal-protons in the solid crystal grid. These protons are immobile, while the ones in the acid are not.