this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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Good evening! I am reading up on electricity just for the fun of it. I am still a complete beginner.

With that out of the way, I wonder: are electrons negatively charged inanimate objects, perhaps particles, or are they merely negative charge with no physical form? But perhaps without there being an object to exert charge there is no charge?

An other way of asking this question would to my beginner mind be: could we tag and track an individual electron as it flows - perhaps in a piece of copper without significant voltage so that the electron doesn't rush away in the speed of light?

I guess I want to know this in order to understand whether electrons actually loop around in a closed DC circuit in the speed of light or are they just pushing the electron in front of them, creating a domino effect, not actually traveling very far?

Please excuse my incoherent formulation. It's late at night where I am and of course these questions come to mind when I'm trying to sleep.

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[โ€“] Redjard@reddthat.com 4 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

They are usually very particle like.

The extreme is semiconductors and band fuckery. There you have a lot of stuff that only makes sense with electron particles jumping around accelerating and colliding. You can talk about mean free path in conductors etc.

They do however interact a lot via their charge, so electricity propagating is usually a pressure wave mostly visible in the electric field, with electrons only doing very little, moving slowly. This field is however driven by the electrons, so it really is electrons doing that.

Resistance, diodes, even heat conduction (/"resistance" to heat transfer) directly follows from electrons as particles interacting with atoms or themselves.

I think you loose these particle effects in (type 1) superconductivity. Your cooper pairs are so smooth and non-interacting they might aswell be clouds if you don't zoom in enough (quantum circuits sometimes have singular amounts of those charge carriers running in circles in a tiny superconductor loop).
However, when you look into why superconductivity is a thing and at what temperature you see it etc., that once again derives directly from the properties of electrons and the layout of your material.


Or maybe you meam do electrons have dimensions and physical properties? That they don't.
They have a charge, speed, momentum, ... but interaction is via the charge. That is what touching means, there is no further collision (technically there is electroweak force stuff).
They are not points either because qm eave blurriness stuff.


For your specific electron movement questions. I think electrons in metals under normal current where the metal heats only a litte move at snails pace, literally. In semiconductors it's a lot faster, about bullet speeds if you push some current. Metals could probably also get to bullet speeds but they would vaporize and explode due to the electric and magnetic fields. Faster than that isn't really feasible. Btw. the random motion at room temperature is also at that scale, though due to quantum effects it's not a bouncing around.

So when you have circuits operate near light speed, that is an electron pressure wave not electrons. The electrons react via quantum fuckery, but changing between speeds and positions at the slow pace described. The reaction is carried on via the electric field. The speed of electricity is the speed of interaction between electrons, not the speed of electrons.

Without the electrons reacting and causing their own electric field changes, the electric field still carries the effects but it quickly dilutes. This is called radio (depending on the timescale of your change), and while it does transmit electricity it does so very weakly, nothing compared to the "continuously electron reinforced short range interaction" wire.

I think you loose these particle effects

*lose :)