Talk:Electricity

Template:WP1.0

Actually "Electrical energy" is the most common meaning of "electricity" in English

"Electricity is a form of energy." Most grade-school curriculum material makes this assertion. So do articles aimed at the general public. They also state that electric companies "sell electricity." They say that quantities of electricity are measured in units of KWh or other energy unit. The WP entry has no section about electrical energy.

Some authors don't know the difference between power and energy. Rather than correctly stating that Energy companies sell energy, they say that these companies sell something called "electric power." This is flat out wrong, since power is a rate. Power is not energy. Power is the flow rate of energy, the rate of energy transfer.

For those who are confused, the issues of power versus energy are easier to understand in metric units: quantities of electric energy are measured in joules, electric companies sell joules of electricity, and when joules are flowing along the wires, the rate of flow is measured in joules per second. The word Watt means exactly the same as "Joule per second." Electric companies don't sell power, they sell energy. In fact, in the last few decades I've watched the literature stop referring to "Electric power companies" and instead correct their descriptions to read "Electric energy companies."

Of course this brings up the contradictory, unscientific, "illegal" definition of electricity, since scientists define the quantity of electricity as being charge, and measured in coulombs. That's the NIST definition in SI units. Unless something has recently changed, the scientific community says that electricity is not a form of energy. (Perhaps this is why the WP entry has no "electrical energy" section? Though it does offhandedly mention that electricity IS a form of energy.) 128.95.172.173 (talk) 01:21, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Don't hold your breath waiting for all electric power companies to change to calling themselves electric energy companies. We all know that in physics power is energy/time, but (unfortunately) in common English this is not always the case, and quite often "power" is used when "energy" is meant. For example, we refer to a powerful bomb, when we're almost never talking about the power it produces in the physics sense, but rather the energy. (Don't hold your breath waiting for us to talk of energyful bombs). And likewise, we still have an electrical power industry not an electrical energy industry (also not the most common term), and what that industry sells you may be electrical energy in the physics sense but it is still electrical power in the common language sense (which need not be the strictly scientific one). And that is ultimately why there is no Wikipedia article on "electrical energy" (rather, it redirects to electrical potential energy). The "power company" sells you energy by giving you access to an electric field and potential, and you draw energy from it. BUT this energy is electrical potential energy until you turn it into some other kind of energy, such as light or heat or the kinetic energy of motion. At which point it is no longer electrical potential energy, which is why our only article on electrical energy leaves "potential" in the term. All electrical energy is potential energy, since as soon as it's no longer potential, it's also no longer electrical. SBHarris 02:15, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

emcompasses

should be encompasses. Muki987 (talk) 16:32, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Electric Motors

Electric Motors external references via Wikipedia

216.191.228.218 (talk) 17:48, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Edit request from WilliamStott, 22 July 2011

Hey, Wikipedia experts! The "electricity" entry has this:

In June 1752 he is reputed to have attached a metal key to the bottom of a dampened kite string and flown the kite in a storm-threatened sky.[11] A succession of sparks jumping from the key to the back of the hand showed that lightning was indeed electrical in nature.[12]

What "hand"? No hand is mentioned earlier. Presumably, the word "kite" should be used in place of "hand."

WilliamStott (talk) 15:57, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

It should read "his hand". I've changed it. —BillC ^talk 17:15, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Scope of the article

Ok, I don't think that the topic of this article includes all of electromagnetism. If it did we would have to merge it with electromagnetism.

I also don't think that it includes most production of visible light, the movement of an electron in an orbital is not electricity in the sense that it is normally considered electricity. I think we're only interested in electron flow in conductors, plasmas, super and semiconductors, not electron orbitals within a single atom.

Nor, do I think the propagation of radio waves/light in free space itself part of this topic, although electricity can obviously launch and catch radio waves in transmitters and receivers.

And I don't think that electricity is just "electricity", a random word in the English language. I'm pretty certain that the concept of electricity is international, and not just an accident of English.

Does anyone violently disagree with any of that?Planetscared (talk) 04:13, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Well, the problem is that the word "electricity" is like "matter"-- it's not really a scientific word, but a pre-scientific word. I'm all for cutting it down to "Commerical applications of electromagnetism" or something, but I'm still not all that sure of which ones we'd choose. Some time ago I had to fight to get the most common use of the word electricity (as in "is your house wired for electricity?") into the lede. Do we really only want to refer to electrical energy per time that is provided commercially, by the electrical power industry by means of a connection through a conductor to an electric power station? Will electronics be part of "electricity"? The charge that runs into and out of my house, as A.C., is only a few amp-sec (coulombs), roughly the same as in a flashlight. The wiring has to be big only because the flow in both directions is counted, but the charge into and out of the house is zero over 1/60th sec -- mostly the electrons just sit and jiggle. I rent access to a potential and I buy energy-- the power company actually couldn't care less about how many electrons are used to deliver this energy (and in fact it's not that many, as noted), so long as I don't start a fire. So what is the subject of this article? Commercial electrical power? Again, perhaps we should just delete it and re-direct. SBHarris 04:52, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

To my view, electricity is certainly a scientific word, it's just that the theory isn't the current/main one, it's been subsumed. I mean were 'epicycles' scientific? I would say they certainly were, and are, they made and can still make quite accurate predictions, it's just that they're not a complete or the best description. But the article on epicycles should still logically cover all about epicycles; and this article should logically cover all forms of electricity. (By cover I don't mean it should all be here, but it should all be summarised here, and link out to more complete descriptions on particular parts where appropriate, like static electricity for example.)Planetscared (talk) 17:25, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Basically, just because it's old science, doesn't mean it's not scientific, this isn't pseudoscience at all!Planetscared (talk) 17:25, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

And I think this thing about electrons moving slowly or cycling backwards and forwards a bit, to my mind that says more about how powerful the electromagnetic forces really are than anything else; they create big forces and hardly move! Feynman once said that if there was a small percentage imbalance in the charges in your body, you would explode at near to the speed of light! Electrical forces are really, really strong!Planetscared (talk) 17:25, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

You want to "cover" this electricity new-fangled idea like phlogiston or aether or the Bohr-Rutherford atom? As a history of science thingie? But where is our cutoff-- about the time of Maxwell's 1861 paper? Since you seem to have no trouble wanting to discuss the near-field inductive parts of the near and far fields of electromagnetics as "electricity", but you don't like the far-fields (EM radiation) that are just as necessary? You're okay with electric trains, motors, transformers and metal detectors, but regard radio as "off the reservation"? How abouy MRI pickup coils? Are you going to give me the "Lorentz" force? Can Maxwell have back his imaginary displacement current in free space, even though no actual charges are flowing across the insulating capacitor gap (or indeed in any vacuum, for any signal)? Is it at THAT point that Maxwell's romantic notion of EMF takes us into the modern age and requires us to go beyond Faraday and Ampere's quaint "electricity"? SBHarris 21:07, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm certainly not saying that most of those things should be completely excluded, but I don't feel that they're the core of the topic, but they're related in a way that is important to the topic, and thus should be mentioned (probably not MRI coils though, unless I'm missing something).Planetscared (talk) 01:03, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Merging of unnecessarily split content about electricity from other separate articles

Some topics related to electricity are just subtopics of electricity and actually are pure parts of this topic of electricity and should be merged into this article, unnecessary distribution of information about electricity confuses and annoys a user searching for just a specific part of content about the main topic and should be stopped and merged back instead of being split. These topics are electricity generation and transmission. Such information is expected by the viewer to be on the same page as a subtopic of electricity. If any common information is not found on the obvious page a person starts feeling startled and annoyed of Wikipedia.