What Are Electrons REALLY Doing In A Wire? Quantum Physics and High School Myths
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Channel: Atoms and Sporks
Views: 32,935
Rating: 4.845767 out of 5
Keywords: quantum physics, electricity, solid state physics
Id: KGJqykotjog
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)
Published: Tue Feb 04 2020
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10:20 hold up, isn't glass opaque to IR? And why are rubber and most salts so opaque?
Good explanation!
I was hoping for a bit more discussion on the movement of electrons in a wire though. That's presented intuitively in the pinball model, but you didn't quite address the net flow of charge in a conduction band.
Saying the electrons don't scatter off nuclei like bumpers doesn't leave me with a clear sense of what they actually do instead. Do electrons in a wire with potential difference have relatively constant speed, barring minor interference from impurities and phonons?
Great stuff, glad you shared. Your videos are a useful reality check before I speak to students because even though I "know better" the bad analogies are crutches I find myself using.
The historical method of teaching the material does seem pretty prominent in solid state physics. I just opened up Ashcroft/Mermin again after quite some time, and sure enough, chapter 1 is on the Drude model, chapter 2 is on the Sommerfeld model, and chapter 3 is titled "Failures of the the free electron model".
Really good video. I'm wondering about the phonons.
If you can get metals to superconduct by cooling the metal down enough so that there are minimal high-energy phonons and still some electrons move into the delocalised state, is there something to be said for getting the phonon frequency to be an integer multiple of the electron frequency somehow so they like enforce each other or some shit?
Not sure if that makes any sense. Just drunk and watched this, and wondering about superconductivity which I don't understand.
Cool video! After watching I spent five minutes trying to open in youtube. Gave up
I was hoping to have one question answered about what electrons actually do, and maybe I missed it:
We often hear that electricity moves near the speed of light. Does a particular electron in the conductive band actually do that, or is it more like the pipe filled with tennis balls analogy, where electrons moving in one part of the pipe cause propagation effects (close to speed of light) to cause an electron to leave the other end of the wire (pipe). Thanks!
As a high school student it’s a bit overwhelming but still a good vid