Science, asked by purvaja9448, 1 year ago

How can current travel so fast even if drift velocity is so slow?

Answers

Answered by smartcow1
2

It seems you are contrasting the speed of propagation of current with the speed of the individual charge carriers.

These two things are clearly separate. There are many examples. Consider sound.

A fire cracker goes off at the other end of a football field from you. You hear the sound a few 100 ms later. The air molecules that were by the firecracker didn't end up by you. They didn't travel far at all. However, they pushed on their neighbors, which pushed on their neighbors, etc, all the way to your ears. This pushing can propagate a lot faster than individual molecules can move.

Think of a long hollow cardboard tube filled with small balls just a little smaller than the inside diameter of the tube. All the balls are touching each other. You push on one ball on one end and move it 1 mm. The ball at the other end then moves 1 mm. However, none of the balls themselves moved more than 1 mm and they did that as slowly as you pushed, yet the propagation of the push was instantaneous on your human scale.

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