this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago

In Benjamin Franklin’s experiments, he came up with the convention that we use today to define a “positive” charge. As it turns out, electrons, discovered much later, are negatively charged according to the convention. Lots of chemical and physical reactions involve electrons as charge carriers, so lots of physical phenomena have this weird opposite thing going on. E.g. electric current or “conventional current” flows in the opposite direction of electron current. Chemical reactions are also weird. Reduction reactions involve a reduction in electric charge, but gaining an electron. The model works just fine, but it can be tricky and/or annoying at times.

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