My brain is more wired to think in terms of physics than electronics right now, so I have a simple question—and believe me I've tried to get this information from more than a dozen sources, but they usually don't spend any time explaining why they view it that way—or maybe they do but I am confused by the other explanations I've found. I am imagining I have a really good microscope and I can see where the electrons, protons, electric and magnetic fields are in a circuit that is in operation.

The context is thinking about the flow of charge in a common electronics schematic where a battery is the power source.

1. Is charge a reference to the electric field around electrons? Is it always that?

2. Is the '+' side of a battery (usually explained as the source of charge) actually a source of holes flowing out of the battery or it is the source of electrons flowing out?

Presumably the answers will imply whether the ground represents a sink or a source for charge.

 

With electron flow it occurs from Neg to Positive, i.e. Electrons flow from the negative terminal to the positive The conventional flow is from positive to negative, blame it on Benjamin Franklin!

 

With electron flow it occurs from Neg to Positive, i.e. Electrons flow from the negative terminal to the positive The conventional flow is from positive to negative, blame it on Benjamin Franklin!

So that means the positive terminal of a battery is a source of holes for the circuit, and the flow of charge is actually from the negative battery terminal to the positive one, and the ground is a source of charge.

Any idea about what charge is in physics terms?

 

My brain is more wired to think in terms of physics than electronics right now, so I have a simple question—and believe me I've tried to get this information from more than a dozen sources, but they usually don't spend any time explaining why they view it that way—or maybe they do but I am confused by the other explanations I've found. I am imagining I have a really good microscope and I can see where the electrons, protons, electric and magnetic fields are in a circuit that is in operation.

The context is thinking about the flow of charge in a common electronics schematic where a battery is the power source.

1. Is charge a reference to the electric field around electrons? Is it always that?

2. Is the '+' side of a battery (usually explained as the source of charge) actually a source of holes flowing out of the battery or it is the source of electrons flowing out?

Presumably the answers will imply whether the ground represents a sink or a source for charge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_charge
https://www.khanacademy.org/science...-force-and-electric-field/a/ee-electric-field

1. Charge is a fundamental property of elementary particles. Charge is measured in coulombs, and one electron has the minimum amount of charge, and it is equal to 1.602 E-19 coulombs. The electric field around an isolated particle has a radial component that is the same in all directions. You can imagine an opposite charge of the same magnitude located on the point at infinity. The electric field direction points straight away from a positive point charge, and straight at a negative point charge. The magnitude of the electric field (which is a vector) falls off as:

\( \cfrac{1}{r^{2}} \)

coming to or going away from the point charge. Where r is the radial distance from the point charge.

2. It turns out that the equations for circuits do not depend on any particular assumption about what may or may not flow in a particular direction. As long as you are consistent in the assumption the arithmetic used for solving problems always gives the correct answer.

 

So that means the positive terminal of a battery is a source of holes for the circuit, and the flow of charge is actually from the negative battery terminal to the positive one, and the ground is a source of charge.

Any idea about what charge is in physics terms?

No! Holes only occur in the solid material of a semiconductor. Batteries do not have holes. What happens in semiconductor is a whole other branch of physics, the study of which may come later.

 

1. Is charge a reference to the electric field around electrons? Is it always that?

Charge is a characteristic of an electron that generates its electric field, which is negative for an electron.

2. Is the '+' side of a battery (usually explained as the source of charge) actually a source of holes flowing out of the battery or it is the source of electrons flowing out?

The (+) side of a battery has electrons flowing in, and the (-) side has electrons flowing out.

Presumably the answers will imply whether the ground represents a sink or a source for charge.

The ground is just a electrical reference point and has no other unique characteristics.
It can either source or sink charge that is moving to some location.

So that means the positive terminal of a battery is a source of holes for the circuit,

There are no holes flowing in a circuit with normal conductors.
Holes are only referenced as flowing in semiconductors where the hole is actually the absence of an electron in the semiconductor lattice.

 

The terminal marked with a + sign does not have to be the source of anything.

It can represent a force field, an electrical potential, also known as e.m.f. (electromotive force).
We can create static electric fields that do not require any charge carriers. The field can be labeled with + and - signs in order to represent the relative intensity of the field.

A + sign means that a positive charge will experience a force that tries to move the charge towards a location with less positive potential (and not necessarily one marked with a - sign).

 

blame it on Benjamin Franklin!

Poor Ben.
He had a 50% chance of getting his arbitrary designation right, and we know how that works.
It was over a hundred years before it was determined his designation was incorrect.

 

Another poor soul confused by conventional current.

Do yourself a huge favor and forget about trying to imagine a physics model for conventional current.

 

My brain is more wired to think in terms of physics than electronics right now, so I have a simple question—and believe me I've tried to get this information from more than a dozen sources, but they usually don't spend any time explaining why they view it that way—or maybe they do but I am confused by the other explanations I've found. I am imagining I have a really good microscope and I can see where the electrons, protons, electric and magnetic fields are in a circuit that is in operation.

The context is thinking about the flow of charge in a common electronics schematic where a battery is the power source.

1. Is charge a reference to the electric field around electrons? Is it always that?

2. Is the '+' side of a battery (usually explained as the source of charge) actually a source of holes flowing out of the battery or it is the source of electrons flowing out?

Presumably the answers will imply whether the ground represents a sink or a source for charge.

First, you won't see electrons moving very fast in most circuits with your really good microscope. You will wait to see much change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity

Don't think of ground as a source or sink for charge as the absolute number of charge carriers doesn't change, they just reconfigure due to forces exerted on them. Ground is just a reference point.

Electric charge is a fundamental physical property of matter. Charge in isolation is not usable 'energy', we only care about the differences between potential energies of various configurations. The static addition of other charged particles, by some force, is expressed at a static electric field with potential energy. The EM field is the propagator of EM energy when forces cause rearrangement of charged particles and expresses that rearrangement across the universe.

 

This or similar has been asked a few times in the forums ,
just to add more confusion
in a wire, its not electron flowing...
The speed of an electron in a wire is actuality slow, about 1mm per second !
the common analogy is that as one electron goes in one end, one pops out the other

unless your into deep physics, dont worry about it ,it wont help you in electronics.

 

Another poor soul confused by conventional current.

Do yourself a huge favor and forget trying to imagine a physics model for conventional current.

I don't think conventional current is the root cause. The root cause IMO is thinking that currents are the electrical energy in the circuit. When you think that, you also start to think that the physical direction (in/out like water) of charge carrier movements are important to energy transfers.

 

Poor Ben.
He had a 50% chance of getting his arbitrary designation right, and we know how that works.
It was over a hundred years before it was determined his designation was incorrect.

It's no fault of Ben, since he could see into the future. But it is the fault of everyone (especially those early on) that didn't want to reconcile the difference in nomenclature. Not to mention that Ben could have labeled it 'A' instead of '+'. I wonder if people would have felt more pressure to reconcile the difference if that had happened. Or perhaps if those that followed decided to label electrons as "woof" charged and their opposite as "meow" charged.

Thanks to all for the responses!

 

My brain is more wired to think in terms of physics than electronics right now, so I have a simple question—and believe me I've tried to get this information from more than a dozen sources, but they usually don't spend any time explaining why they view it that way—or maybe they do but I am confused by the other explanations I've found. I am imagining I have a really good microscope and I can see where the electrons, protons, electric and magnetic fields are in a circuit that is in operation.

The context is thinking about the flow of charge in a common electronics schematic where a battery is the power source.

1. Is charge a reference to the electric field around electrons? Is it always that?

2. Is the '+' side of a battery (usually explained as the source of charge) actually a source of holes flowing out of the battery or it is the source of electrons flowing out?

Presumably the answers will imply whether the ground represents a sink or a source for charge.

"charge" is a property that particles have -- just like they have "mass".

Some particles, such as protons, have a charge that is assigned a positive value, while other particles, such as electrons, have a charge that is assigned a negative value.

Just like particles that have mass exert a force-at-a-distance on other particles that have mass, so too do particles that have charge exert a force-at-a-distance on other particles that have charge.

In the case of mass, the force is always attractive. This is why we only need positive mass values.

But in the case of charge, the force can be either attractive or repulsive. Particles with the same type of charge repel each other, while particles with opposite types of charge attract each other. This is why we need two types of charge. That we are talking about discrete particles was not known at the time. To account for the observations (which were based on statically charged objects resulting from rubbing them together, such as glass and silk), Charles du Fay concluded that there were two types of fluid involved, which he termed "vitreous" and "resinous". This was early in the 1700s. Around the mid-1700s, Benjamin Franklin proposed that there was actually just one kind of fluid and that what was observed as two types of charge was the result of there either being an excess or a deficit of this fluid on a substance compared to the amount it would normally have. This allowed for the concept of the conservation of charge, which was harder to deal with in the two-fluid model. Franklin arbitrarily declared that a piece of amber rubbed with wool (I think I have those two correct) gained fluid from the wool (this makes intuitive sense compared to fluid transferring from something hard and solid to something like cloth). So he said that the amber became positively charged while the wool became negatively charged. It was well over a century later that the electron was discovered and it was learned that when amber is rubbed with wool that electrons are actually transferred from the amber to the wool, leaving the "positively charged" amber with a deficit of electrons and the "negatively charged" wool with an excess of them. Over that past century, a lot of both scientific and industrial literature and developments had occurred and all of it used the positive/negative convention consistent with amber becoming positively charged. So there was no practical alternative but to remain consistent with this and assign the electron a negative charge (and the proton, discovered a couple decades later, as being positively charged).

Notice that no mention of electric fields has been involved in this. The notion of an electric field is a mathematical model for the force exerted upon a charge at some point is space as a result of the distribution of other charges, both positive and negative, around it.

Inside a battery, the electrochemistry moves electrons from the positive terminal to the negative terminal. This is what makes the positive terminal positive and the negative terminal negative. These electrons then flow from the negative terminal into the external circuit while electrons from the external circuit flow into the positive terminal.

Mathematically, this can be described either as negatively-charged electrons flowing from negative terminal toward the positive terminal, or as positively-charged virtual particles (we call them "holes") flowing from the positive terminal toward the negative terminal. In either case, IF you track the math correctly (something that the electron-current crowd never does), you end up with the same result, current, which is the movement of charge, flows from positive to negative.

Having said that, the concept of "holes" has a very specific meaning in solid state physics and that meaning is very different from what is being discussed here, so it is best not to talk about conduction in normal conductors as involving holes, because it doesn't (in the sense that "holes" are typically interpretted.

 

Another poor soul confused by conventional current.

Do yourself a huge favor and forget about trying to imagine a physics model for conventional current.

That would be fine if people didn't explain things like how a transistor works with physics terminology.

 

Ah but
do electrons actulay exist ?

 

So that means the positive terminal of a battery is a source of holes for the circuit, and the flow of charge is actually from the negative battery terminal to the positive one, and the ground is a source of charge.

Any idea about what charge is in physics terms?

The flow of "charge carriers" is from negative to positive. But the charge that is flowing in that direction is, itself, negative, so the flow of "charge" is from positive to negative.

 

To no real purpose we can also argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

 

It's no fault of Ben, since he could see into the future. But it is the fault of everyone (especially those early on) that didn't want to reconcile the difference in nomenclature. Not to mention that Ben could have labeled it 'A' instead of '+'. I wonder if people would have felt more pressure to reconcile the difference if that had happened. Or perhaps if those that followed decided to label electrons as "woof" charged and their opposite as "meow" charged.

Thanks to all for the responses!

It really makes no difference in circuit theory. It's trivial to understand the few circuit conditions that dictate when, where and why it matters. I've use conventional and physical currents calculations in the same circuit when required. Its not a big deal.

 

That would be fine if people didn't explain things like how a transistor works with physics terminology.

Sorry, but transistors are solid-state physics devices so it's impossible not to use physics terminology to explain them. You don't need to use physics terminology to use them in a circuit.