Re: electric charge

[Larry Cartwright <exit60@CABLESPEED.COM>]

William Beaty wrote:
> I have to admit that my working with electronics has biased me in favor of
> the charge-as-substance idea.

Me too, and I'm *functionally* quite comfortable with a "flow" model.  I
first learned about electricity by the "think of it like water flowing
through pipes" analogy and by experimenting, and by building radios and
stereos and other circuits; and then started out training to be an
electrical engineer where current was king and theory took a back seat
to results.  So OK, you want current flowing or charge flowing, or
itty-bitty sub-atomic airplanes carrying cargoes of energy and
parachuting them out when they get to a load resistance, OK, I can do
that.

But as a physics teacher I have always worked towards having a nice tidy
theoretical base for my models.  "Flowing charge", a particle property
that flows independently of the particles it describes, has always
seemed an awkward model for dealing with an EM phenomenon.  I feel like
nature has fooled us, focusing our attention so rigidly on the
electrical charge for over a century that we continue to miss what's
really going on.  It has always seemed to me that any day now, any
minute now, some insightful theoretician is going to come up with a
bosonic model that corrects our backward thinking and makes "flowing
charge" seem like the 20th century equivalent of phlogiston and caloric
and aether.  I guess I'm letting my dreams carry me too far away from
reality as we know it.

Best wishes,

Larry

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Larry Cartwright   <exit60@cablespeed.com>
Retired (June 2001) Physics Teacher
Charlotte MI 48813 USA
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