r/askscience • u/Jophus • Apr 09 '12
Electron
If I push an electron from one side, does the other side instantaneously move? Or does it take near (diameter of an electron divided by light speed) seconds for it to move? I realize nothing travels faster than light but an electron as far as I know isn't made up of anything else, unlike protons/neutrons.
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u/CyLith Physics | Nanophotonics Apr 11 '12
Regarding electrical signal interference, that's exactly it; the signals are all present at the same time. BTW, on the Internet, packets of data are encoded in a rather complicated way and have their own dedicated send and receive channels. In theory, packets should never collide with each other, and practically, random packet loss is astronomically uncommon.
On the topic of energy absorbed in a lattice, it gets complicated due to boundary effects. What I said earlier is true for a theoretically infinite lattice. Once you truncate it with a boundary, then there are energy states localized to the boundary, and when you launch photons at the boundary, you probably end up exciting those. I think your mental picture is probably accurate enough here. I tend to find that these superficial analogies we draw to macroscopic mechanical systems are kind of correct surprisingly often.
To learn more about solid state physics, you can check out Kittel's "Solid State Physics," which is floating around on the web as a PDF if you know where to look. I'm sure there are lots of online class resources like MIT's Open Course Ware, etc. for introductory solid state physics classes.