[Elecraft] Items you think you can depend on

[Fred Jensen]

Many many years ago, a colleague on my engineering team showed me an 
article entitled, "Where does the electricity go after it leaves the 
toaster."  I do not remember the name of the journal in which it 
appeared, but it was funny, and I've never forgotten the explanation.

The answer to your question is ... "You pretty much answered it," and 
you sound more like a physicist or EE than a lawyer.  My analogy for 
electric current is those little hanging steel ball thingys on some 
overpaid executives' desks:  Pull the end one out and let it drop and 
the far end one shoots out.  It's almost instantaneous, as it is with 
electrons.  You sure feel it if it bangs you in the nose, but it isn't 
the same ball that started it all.  I think the actual drift rate of an 
individual electron, should something like that actually exist, is very 
slow and not very far.

Electrons are a lot like snowflakes ... notwithstanding the urban legend 
that every one is different, I did a year in the northern interior of 
Alaska and rest assured, "Seen one, you've seen 'em all."  I charge my 
LiFePO4 with a solar panel in the hope that eventually it will be full 
of green electrons as opposed to the brown ones it came with.  I've 
started claiming "green power bonus" in little field outings although 
mathematics can only give me a probability that I've replaced all the 
brown ones.  They're all at the bottom of course, I don't discharge the 
battery that far, so I think I'm good here.

73,

Fred ["Skip"] K6DGW
Sparks NV DM09dn
Washoe County

On 9/4/2017 7:09 PM, Dauer, Edward wrote:
>
> OK, I have to ask this question seriously even though this thread has 
> become a spoof.
>
> Is it really the same electrons that flow from the municipal generator 
> to our rigs and then back to the powerhouse again?  I would have 
> guessed that any individual electron motivated by an applied voltage 
> would simply have moved an atomic diameter or two to fill in a spot in 
> an adjacent depleted valence shell, such that a current flow is 
> actually a shuffling of electrons from one positive ion to the next, 
> but that individual electrons really don’t move very far.  And then 
> they all shuffle back the other way every one sixtieth of a second.  
> Sort of like cars on Route 128 around Boston, as I recall from my days 
> there.  On the other hand, maybe the uncertainties in the quantum wave 
> function preclude our ever knowing an electron’s position anyway, in 
> which case the question is moot, right?
>
> For those who care to respond, be kind.  I am a lawyer, not a 
> physicist.  I will return the graciousness if anyone has a question 
> about the mediaeval origins of the writ of coram nobis.  Off-line, of 
> course.
>
> Ted, KN1CBR
>
>