Opposite Direction And Value: Fill & Download for Free

Mulla Nasreddin is a famous folk character of Central Asia. His stories have been told across a vast geographic area extending from Hungary through India to China, and from Southern Siberia to North Africa.Mulla is often shown sitting on a donkey facing backwards as shown in the following picture.Indian people are like the donkey which is moving of its own in the right direction of development, development of scientific and modern values and harmonizing Indian values with the global values.However, Indian leadership is looking at the opposite direction and dreaming to create an India that existed thousands of years ago.We are in 21st century AD, but our leaders are looking backwards towards the values of the society of 21st century BC.We need forward looking leadership which can take India in the right direction with the right set of values.Source of picture: Google Images

Why is the direction of flow of electrons opposite to the direction of flow of electric current?First of all, everyone who says that current is the flow of electrons should go back to school. It’s not; it’s just NOT. Reach up and slap yourselves, right now. I’ll wait…. Oh, and I don’t care if your teacher(s) told you it was the flow of electrons. It is not, and they should go back to school too.Okay. Pay attention:Current is the flow of charges. Charged particles if you like. Are electrons the only charged particles? No. Okay, you in the back sit down and stop calling out. Electrons are not the only particles that can move. That’s wrong. Yes, I know protons don’t move around, they’re locked in the nucleus. But the entire nucleus can move; the entire atom can move, or rather the whole ion, because remember, the particles have to be charged.And that’s exactly what happens in a glass of salt water if you put a current through it. Positively charged sodium cations move toward the cathode (negative terminal) while negatively charged chloride anions move toward the anode (positive terminal). That’s where we get the names cation and anionThe unit of electric charge is the coulomb (symbol=C). And charge can be positive or negative. So a coulomb (or any amount of charge) can be positive or negative.The unit of electric current is the ampere (symbol=A). An ampere is a current flow of one coulomb per second ( 1 A = 1 C/s). Obviously, if the number of coulombs is positive, the current in amperes is positive, and if the number of coulombs is negative, the current in amperes is negative.In particular, a 1 A current flow is a flow of +1 C/s, and a -1 A current flow is a flow of -1 C/s. But a current of 1 A can be a flow (each second) of a coulomb of positive charge flowing one way, a coulomb of negative charge flowing the other way, or a half coulomb of each, flowing in two different directions (which is what’s going on in the salt water.)So why do soooo many people get this wrong, and say that electric current is the flow of electrons? Because it’s true in metals. In metals (and also in vacuum tubes, for those of us older than dirt). Most people’s experience with electricity is confined to currents in wires. And wires are made of what? Metal.Can it be that simple? I’m afraid so. When people picture an electric current, they picture a current in a wire. Wires are metal, and metals are held together with (surprise!) metallic bonds, in which the nuclei of the metal atoms are surrounded by a “soup” of easily mobile valence electrons. That’s why metals are shiny, and that’s why they conduct electricity. Freely mobile electrons.So, in wires, the charged particles that are moving are electrons, and electrons have a negative charge. A coulomb of electrons has a value of -1 C. And -1 C moving one way is exactly the same as +1 C moving the other way.But don’t most currents flow in wires? Isn’t that the right way to think about it?No. Most current does not flow in wires. A lot does, mainly on Earth. But in lightning, which dwarfs the output of power plants, the current flows through a plasma. Ionized air. What are the charge carriers? Free electrons in one direction and positive nuclei in the other direction, simultaneously although, in terms of charge, not equally, due to the mass disparity between electrons and ions.So in metal wires, it’s electrons, but in the remaining approximately 100% of the observable universe, nearly all the current flows through plasma.But I digress. The basic question is: Did Franklin get it “wrong”? Not really; he made an arbitrary choice about something that is completely arbitrary. He could have called the charges east and west, or hither and yon, or yin and yang, and it wouldn’t have mattered. To use them in a math formula we’d still have to arbitrarily assign positive to one charge and negative to the other, just as we arbitrarily assign positive to upward motion and negative to downward motion. (And not all textbooks agree on that!)This is no more difficult to understand than the idea that a ball moving eastward with a negative velocity is actually moving westward. If you want the math to work, you have no choice. Electric charges are identified as + and -. Get over it.<mic drop>

Most consultants and investment bankers want to move into data analytics - why would you want to go in the opposite direction? :)Data is going to be the new oil, and anyone who can extract value from it is going to be valued by virtue knowing how to work with data. Data analytics/mining/science are all going to be incredibly lucrative and competitive fields in the future.