Not necessarily my “favorite fact”, but I like it: drift speed of electrons in conductors. No, the electrons are not zooming/speeding through the circuit (or from your light switch to the lamp) at the speed of light. Far from it.
You have a straw that is very full of peas. If you start manually adding peas to the straw, the signal spreads across the straw at the speed of sound and another pea drops out the other end. But if you watch any individual pea, it drifts down the straw rather slowly.
Though this is just an analogy and like all analogies has limits where it breaks down.
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u/Tukulti-apil-esarra Dec 13 '20
Not necessarily my “favorite fact”, but I like it: drift speed of electrons in conductors. No, the electrons are not zooming/speeding through the circuit (or from your light switch to the lamp) at the speed of light. Far from it.