> Canonically, electric current results from the collective movement of electrons, each carrying one indivisible chunk of electric charge. But the dead steadiness of Chen’s current implied that it wasn’t made of units at all. It was like finding a liquid that somehow lacked individually recognizable molecules<p>In maxwell's equations, current density J is defined in terms of the E-field. When talking about electricity, people make the typical quantum mechanical wave-particle mistake. Electricity refers to two things, photons and electrons and how they interact with eachother. Both act as wave-particles, but photons act more like waves and electrons more like particles. The thing that gets people is that photons are the things that move energy around. A photon is an electromagnetic wave. In a wire, you can have an electromagnetic wave traversing the wire at some proportion of the speed of light, while the electrons are moving at speeds closer to meters per second. We defined current to be proportional to the E-field (because that is what is moving the energy) and thus we shouldn't refer to the movement of electrons as current.
So what happened to the discoverer? <i>"In the end, Chen, who successfully earned his doctorate in the spring and has since gone to work in finance..."</i>
There's a confusion this article isn't helpful with: there are physical electrons, the actual physicalparticles. They move in the metal very slowly. But, their motion propagates very quickly, and turns out that the change in motion acts almost exactly like an electron itself, up to having a different mass. This is the "electron" quasi-particle, which is the abstraction that's breaking down. this only shows up about a screen or two deep into the article.
Some good conversations on the topic here<p><a href="https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/560853/is-electricity-really-the-flow-of-electrons-or-is-it-more-involved" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/560853/is-electr...</a>
I remember one of the first question asked in university was "what's an electric current?" I said something along the lines "it's a directed flow of charged particles". The professor asked do you contain charged particles, do you move, are you an electric current?
I’ve always wondered if you tried to run a current through a metal belt moving in the opposite direction of electron flow at a speed higher than the drift velocity if the circuit would complete?<p>(For the sake of argument let’s says it’s not connected like a belt would be. )
Maybe the likening of superconductors and the cuprates resistance behavior is a clue.<p>Entirely speculative, but a larger scale analogy that I can relate to is a set of long pipes that fit together fairly well.<p>At low temperatures their entanglement (interaction with the rest of the universe) diminishes and they densify into a kind of crystalline arrangement that facilitates fairly unimpeded transfer of whatever energy flow really is; be it electrons, waves, or shifts of field energy in some form outside of my non-expert understanding.<p>At higher temperatures the material starts to jiggle, to expand, and to not quite align as well because everything's further apart and not quite right. This also causes more of the material to interact with energy that would have passed through at superconductive temperatures.<p>Maybe the packed pipes analogy is too far. A crystalline lattice where the interconnection between the components offers gaps could behave similarly in 3D space, or whatever N-dimension space might exist if that's something not just in science fiction.<p>Reflecting further, the densely packed (near absolute zero) conditions might also allow the 'strange material' to transition to a different sort of phase of matter. A state where individual components are packed together so tightly that they cease behaving as the groups we normally model and instead are interchangeable / intermingled with their neighbors. The electrons / waves could join the collective and dislodge a similar composition of material at a 'lower pressure'/'relief of potential' point.
It is, in my opinion, still "electrons". More pedantically, the electron field is still the mechanism for nonzero current, regardless of its exotic state. This must be the case as there's no other stable charge-carrying field that's not strongly localised to the nucleii (in this material, or any solid material I can think of). The article does a lot of waffling without admitting this basic point.
<i>In the end, Chen, who successfully earned his doctorate in the spring and has since gone to work in finance, crafted a handful of nearly flawless nanowires.</i><p>Material conditions still trump material science.
Dumb layman question: why is there no mention of the Standard Model and what it would predict/simulate here? Is this too large-scale for that to be realistically usable?
We are worried that we don't understand LLMs - well, we also don't quite understand gravity and how electricity works, and we use them every day!
At times like these, I like to turn to this (fairly short) article on what Feynman said about science.<p><a href="https://philosophynow.org/issues/114/Richard_Feynmans_Philosophy_of_Science" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://philosophynow.org/issues/114/Richard_Feynmans_Philos...</a><p>EG: "Feynman says that to be slavish to a received view or even to a method for discovering the facts means that we can never advance scientifically, for the old ‘facts’ may need to be overhauled in order to discover new ones, and how that may be done is, well, up for grabs."
> Canonically, electric current results from the collective movement of electrons, each carrying one indivisible chunk of electric charge<p>It has been false for a long time since we know electrons dont move that fast. Electricity is a wave.