How does electricity flows?

The goal of this document is to come up with a better model to understand how electricity flows through a wire. What are the fundamental reasons that makes it flow.

Objectives

Come up with a good visual model of how electricity actually flows.

What is resistance?

How does electricity flows across a capacitor?

How does electricity flows across an inductor? Why is the flow opposed?

My Understanding

When you connect the battery to the wire that is in turn connected to the bulb on the other side. Because of the battery an electric field is produced (nothing is produced, the battery always has an electric field around it) which flows (it does not flows, it channelizes itself through the conductor) through the wire at the speed of light (it does not flows, it exists everywhere in space). Because of this, the electrons inside the conductor get a net electric field and start drifting very slowly in the direction opposite to that of the electric field. The electrons don’t get a clear path but they constantly bounce into the metal lattice ions (Drude’s model). But at the end of the day, this is what constitutes current in the wire. It basically the number of electrons that are passing through a given cross section of that wire per unit time.

What is resistance then?

It’s the measure of how severely the flow of electron is being restricted in presence of the electric field.

What is electric potential then?

I heard that just like electric field, even this exists everywhere in space. Electric potential comes as a result of electric field.

How does the electromagnetism comes into play?

I don’t know

How does the battery look like in steady state?

Probably this is how a battery looks like in steady state. Since there is a separation of charge on both the terminals of the cell. An electric field is present

But electron isn’t really a particle, right? Then how come it hits the metal lattice ion?

Probably this has something to do with the wave nature of the electron.

What does it mean by powering something up?

We need to “power” the light bulb by giving it “energy”. What do these terms mean exactly? Why is there only a finite amount of it available?

In a simple setup of a bulb, battery and wire. What makes the bulb glow?

The battery puts out an electric field, when connected to a wire, the electric field is channelized through the wire and make the electrons in the conductor and the bulb move. The electrons in the bulb’s filament hit the lattice in such a way that they emit light as electromagnetic wave which appears as a glow to us.

In a simple setup of capacitor, battery and wire. How does the capacitor charges?

When the electric field flows through the plates of the capacitor, one end of the plate being connected to the positive end of the battery which basically force all the electrons to move inside the battery. The exact opposite happens on the other end of the battery, excess electrons flow to cover the other plate of the capacitor. This is how plates of the capacitor are charged.

In a simple setup of inductor, battery and wire. How does the inductor charges?

Ideally the electric field should simply pass through the wire, establish a constant current. But this does not happen. At least, when we connect the battery to the circuit for the very first time, the inductor does not allow any current to pass through it.

So what is happening here? How can we explain this? There is something missing from this model and that is the concept of magnetic fields.