Still in its infancy but electrons flow at the speed of light and when Seagate have perfected their magnetic send and return heads that polarize the electrons at real time as they flow, a piece of soft iron wire 10" long will have a memory capacity of more than 1000Tb.
Now that is what I call interesting.
Now that is what I call interesting.
Only if you sigificantly accelerate them. Ordinary synchrotron inhabitants at 1.5GeV do.
Electrons in conductors exhibit drift speeds of mm/s or cm/s. Really slow.
Don't mix up electron speed with information speed. The information that you closed the light switch reaches your light bulb nearly with the speed of light. The electrons themselves move sloooowly, but your conductor is full of them.
Rundmaus
The currently accepted quantum mechanical description of atoms does not longer have orbits in a geometrical sense. There are no electrons flying around the nucleus on circular orbits.
Rundmaus
You mean Bohr got it wrong? An awful lot of introductory science books will need rewriting! 
The interesting thing about this model is that it allows a semi-classical calculation of energy levels to get the right answers for hydrogen, despite the model being wrong. A warning to all 'practical' people: even if it gives the right answers in some situations it doesn't mean it is right.
The interesting thing about this model is that it allows a semi-classical calculation of energy levels to get the right answers for hydrogen, despite the model being wrong. A warning to all 'practical' people: even if it gives the right answers in some situations it doesn't mean it is right.
Right!
It works fine if your goal is to calculate hydrogen energy levels. It starts getting awfully wrong if you start looking for small, negatively charged spheres flying around in circles
Rundmaus
Jeeze, no need to get quantum on my case just trying ti illustrate some figures of the speed of electrons, and how they don't move fast at all...
just trying ti illustrate some figures of the speed of electrons, and how they don't move fast at all...Depends on the dielectric the waves are going through, and thus Er, and in the case of microstrip PCB layout (signals on the top or bottom, not inner layers) its only about half the speed of light or 6"/nS.
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