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At 02:19 PM 1/17/01 -0700, Larry Woolf wrote:
I personally like the analogy of the pin ball machine. The pins represent
the fixed ions in the lattice. The balls represent the free electrons.
When the machine is tipped one way (positive voltage across the resistor),
the balls (electrons) flow downhill and bump into the pins (dissipating
energy - heat).
One must be careful with such analogies. In a pinball machine, there can
be local accumulations of balls here and there. In the regime where
Kirchhoff's laws apply, this does not happen with electricity.