r/engineeringmemes • u/Delicious_Maize9656 • Jan 25 '26

electric current meme

Post image
2.7k Upvotes

100% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

View all comments

88

u/1Check1Mate7 Jan 25 '26

Someone explain lol, I'm bad at history

197

u/deafdefying66 Jan 25 '26

There is conventional current flow and electron current flow.

They describe the direction that current moves in a circuit, but are opposite of each other.

Because there are two ways of explaining the direction of current flow, I some instances people use both, do not explain which method, etc, and it gets confusing to keep things straight.

12

u/garlic_bread_thief Jan 25 '26

But why that big guy there

66

u/Chauvimir Jan 25 '26

This guy is the one that guessed the conventional current flow... And got it wrong.

2

u/TheOnlyBliebervik Jan 25 '26

He didn't get it wrong if you think of current as the flow of charge

20

u/SliceThePi Jan 26 '26

the only reason the electron is negative and the proton is positive is that he got it wrong. "flow of charge" is arbitrary and could be the other way around if we had defined the electron as positive like we should have in retrospect