Electron Flow

Bill_Marsden said:

Yep, but in wire, microchips, electron tubes, CRTs, sputtering machines, electronic flame offs, LEDs, transistors, and welders it is electrons that are the charge carriers. You are also off on flourescent tubes, it is the electron flow that creates the ionized gas, another name for plasma. Plasma is used for sputtering machines and electronic flame offs (which particularly depends on electron flow to make sure the material is carried in the proper direction).

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When a lithium-ion battery discharges into a resistor, there is zero electron flow in the battery, but there's still a current, carried by positively-charged lithium ions. When an electrolytic capacitor charges, current is carried by ions flowing through the liquid electrolyte. In microchips, LEDs, and transistors, the charge carriers are holes, which do not behave identically to electrons flowing in the opposite direction:

Current is not a flow of electrons; current is a flow of electric charge. It doesn't matter which direction the charge is considered to flow, since charged particles flow in both directions in many circuits.

One very important feature of the Hall effect is that it differentiates between positive charges moving in one direction and negative charges moving in the opposite. The Hall effect offered the first real proof that electric currents in metals are carried by moving electrons, not by protons. The Hall effect also showed that in some substances (especially p-type semiconductors), it is more appropriate to think of the current as positive "holes" moving rather than negative electrons. A common source of confusion with the Hall Effect is that holes moving to the left are really electrons moving to the right, so one expects the same sign of the Hall coefficient for both electrons and holes. This confusion, however, can only be resolved by modern quantum mechanical theory of transport in solids.

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With DC applied to a fluorescent tube, the ions flows from one end of the tube to the other. This is a flow of charged particles, an electric current, but is not a flow of electrons:

When operated from DC, the starting switch is often arranged to reverse the polarity of the supply to the lamp each time it is started; otherwise, the mercury accumulates at one end of the tube.

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Plasma is a fluid, a mixture of positive and negative charged particles, and they can all freely flow, in both directions at the same time. Considering only the electron flow component to be a current is wrong.

When you get into chemical processes it is ions (which are the protons you are naming).

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Protons = positive hydrogen ions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_conductor

Guess what is the majority of our uses for electricity uses? True, it does cover current flow through batteries and other "wet" masses, such as the human body, but in general it is electrons delivered via wires that create the imbalance.

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When an electrical engineer looks at any of these components, the conventional current is considered to go in the same direction; the direction of net positive charge flow.

If you tried to focus on electron current, and continue doing this even when there is no electron flow (when it's actually positive ions flowing in the opposite direction) you'd actually be more wrong than conventional current, which abstracts away the distinction between charge carriers.