Science Memes
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
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- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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Memes
Miscellaneous
Turns out Benjamin Franklin had it right, and it was this time traveler that caused him to flip it to the wrong direction.
While funny, this doesn't work because the time traveler told him specifically which one is negative.
"... Well now I'm not going to do it."
Damn time travelers, ~~always~~ ~~never~~ messing things up!
Man, this one is a good one.
IMHO Franklin is one of the few who would go straight to "what is it?" without blinking.
Always love their comics but since I don't know crap about this stuff it's amusing to see how this one is relevant to a meme. Wish I knew more but only so much I've learned so far. One day perhaps but not today.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
The contributors on this site do an excellent job explaining the comics. Not really ELI5, but more ELI15.
It's okay to not understand every comic, someone else out there figured it out and explained it to us.
You just have to ignore the existence of electron flow. Conventional current flow is all that matters, and the only people who use electron flow are those who design integrated circuits and lunatics
You forgot science enthusiasts who are desperately trying to impress people.
They get lumped in with the lunatics
We don't want 'em.
You mean to tell me that there are people out there whose job it is to design lunatics?
That's fucking awesome. Like a real-life comic book author.
Let's eat grandma
It's also useful to think of the "ground" plane as a sort of well of potential charger carriers that the conventional current model overlooks. Aside from simultaneously visualising what's happening inside simple ICs like BJTs / MOSFETs and the circuit diagrams I've found it a useful way for checking for common mode noise in circuit and PCB design.
I guess this makes me a lunatic? Don't know until we test it;
Someone give me an ~~asylum~~ makerspace to takeover!
Are you implying that there are IC designers who aren’t lunatics?
And that’s why we have positrons instead of the much-cooler-sounding negatrons.
Man, they have positrons and negatrons now? The Transformers franchise is wild.
We gotta keep them out of sports, they are too strong.
The south^of Cybertron^ will rise again?
Oddly when it came time to negotiations, they somehow realized actually calling yourself a Decepticon, was not a good name for inspiring trust.
The current does flow from positive to negative. Electricity is not the flow of electrons - they just generate the field that the electric wave flows through. The electrons don't actually move very far. The wave flows outside of the wire, not in it.
Most circuit diagrams do not draw current flowing in any direction at all. It's just labeled + and -. I don't see anything wrong with this.
But then I get to talk about all those holes flowing.
Uhhhh......pornhub is that way ----->
Wait, no, but first, imagine marbles in a straw!
Pornhub is that way ----->
Imagine a chain getting tugged back and forth
OMG-O-S-H every circuit designed with conventional current just exploded because of your revelation here.
/s
My friend, this is the same branch of science that got us to space with calculations assuming spherical cows.
While we're at it, is a compass needle's North pole actually a South so that it points North? Or is the Earth's North pole actually South so that the needle's North pole points to it?
(I know that I could look this up, I just want to confuse people.)
But that's by design, while this is a convention problem
We decided on North long before we discovered magnetism. But the magnet poles of the earth flip from time to time so ehhh.
So, it doesn't actually change anything; everything still works the same.
But textbooks need to be thrown away and remade, every circuit diagram, every electrical engineering plan, decades of research and research papers have to be combed and corrected, or accept that they're wrong.
While technically possible, it would create colossal risk and unending chaos and It's environmentally unsound, for something that doesn't change anything in the end.
Lazy is not checking your mail.
Refusing to turn reality on its head for a null change in the end is something else entirely.
Couldn't you fix this by also defining electrons as positive? Imo the physicists and electrical engineers should fight it out.
All words are just made up.
The physicists are absolutely right. However, I reject their reality and substitute my own
That sounds like the electrical engineers I know
Eh, i've struggled with this for years but eventually found my peace.
You see, there's two types of electric current: Electrons moving through a wire, and protons moving through water (the second one is also called a pH gradient, it happens e.g. in cell membranes of chloroplasts, fascinating stuff, check it out).
Basically plants do photosynthesis, which is extremely similar to what solar panels do. They generate an electric current, and in that current, positive charges move, so the "direction of current flow" is the correct one.
I have come to accept that the current inside living beings is more important than the current in all the machinery, because without life there would be no machinery, so life deserves to get the "correct" current.
feels like this should be a skeletor quote!
Could someone explain what makes one pole negative/positive? Like, could we have named them Alice/Bob or is there a specific reason we went with +/-?
Guessing here, but +/- is good for describing them as binary opposites as that system already exists. This is a good thing assuming there are two types of charge/pole which behave in opposite ways (Eg move differently in a field). It's also just good to use numbers so that we can describe the amount of + and the amount of -, which numbers already do. It also allows us to describe neutral as neither + nor -, but 0. Again, we already have a scaffold there for numbers and it's easy to copy it for new things when that makes sense.
True, but most of laws, equations etc still work and only specific fields need to adjust for this.
Currents aren't drawn incorrectly. Electrons do move backwards, but since their electric charge is negative, the current goes the correct way.
Doesn't matter in a lot of cases. Just state the flow direction and convention once and then stick with it.