WHY does CURRENT attain STEADY state?

[brainstorm]

I put off responding to this because I wanted to give it some thought first. I understand from your comments that my outspoken insistence on the forum rules bothers you, and in the interest of having a friendly community I thought it might be helpful if I explained my motivations for doing so.

PhysicsForums was not my first online physics community; the place I found first was SciForums. SciForums encouraged speculation as you suggest, and as a result nearly every single thread degenerated into an ugly shouting match between a vast array of crackpots with different worldviews and a few mainstream apologists. Since most of the worldviews were completely uninformed by experiment or logic the discussions were completely pointless. My personal experience is that speculation on an internet forum does not accomplish the goals of "pushing the envelope of existing science" nor promoting the "understanding of established concepts".

In particular, the poor students who wandered in came out far worse off than had they never found the site. It is often impossible for a student to distinguish between fact and fiction in such an environment. The founders of PhysicsForums wanted something different from the many other sites, they wanted a place that would actually be helpful to students. That is why they set up the homework forums as well as the rule against speculation. Those rules are not a hindrance to PF's mission, but the core mechanism for accomplishing it and making PF a unique place.

The reason that I have my "police-ethic" is that I understand from personal experience the practical result of not having these rules, and I don't want to see PF degenerate into that kind of a forum. If you like PF, then I would suggest that, although you may not realize it, these rules are a large part of the reason why you like it. Also, the rules are completely voluntary, you don't have to post here, so if you choose to do so you should be happy to live by the rules you voluntarily agreed to.

If someone really wants to speculate then there are other places online to do so, but I strongly feel that it is important for the integrity of PF and its value to the net that they not do so here.

I hope that helps you understand my point of view and my reasons for doing what I do. I am sorry if I have offended you, but perhaps you can see why it is important to me.

I appreciate your explanation, and believe it or not I also get irritated with groundless speculation when it lacks logic and rigor. The problem I have with being policed in the kind of "speculation" I was doing is that I was not conjuring up counter-rational nonsense without purpose - nor was the original poster speculating about the possibility of charge without mass for no reason. These kinds of hypothetical scenarios actually help to explore the CONCEPTS of charge and mass at the fundamental level.

All I speculated about was that light-energy could be viewed as having charge in the sense that it flows from an emission point in the direction of a black hole or other mass that does not re-emit it in some form, where the contours of spacetime are the conduit. What must have annoyed you was the extent to which I fleshed out the idea, including the notion that all forms of interference in the path of light could be analogized to resistors.

What is speculative about this line of reasoning, actually? It is really just a comparison of light with electricity for the purpose of exploring the notion of charged energy without mass. In reality, it's not even an effective idea for that purpose, because the "poles" that emit and receive light-energy are not massless. Electrons are required to emit light (without exception I believe but maybe I'm forgetting something) and mass is required to produce sufficient gravity to capture light temporarily or permanently.

Considering the specific meaning in what I was saying and responding to it critically would have been more constructive and illuminating than blatantly rejecting it as "speculative." Hopefully you recognize that there is a difference between creatively engaging grounded knowledge and groundlessly speculating about nonsense. It's not like I said that electrons are the microscopic remnants of unicorn farts from when these beautiful, magical creatures roamed abundantly through the cosmos. Something like that, which provides no basis for critically exploring existing knowledge or the potential for future scientific developments, is worth policing. An analogical exploration of the possibility of massless charge and or the extent to which light resembles charged-energy is not a threat to constructive discourse, imo. Censoring it through casually policing posts on how they sound without sufficiently analyzing potential value in its logic, on the other hand, may well be.

 

[brainstorm]

Now because electrons in a metal behave like a fluid, charge flow moving into a thin wire requires that individual charges speed up, and this is because area * velocity = volume flow rate. Volume flow rate is your "current".

Interesting statement. This is an analogy but could it be possible that electrons actually exist in different phases, like matter? What is it about a conductor's electron configuration that renders its electrons more fluid?