The electron-flow model of electricity – the one where electrons march through copper like water through a pipe – isn’t taught because it’s true. It’s taught because it’s easy. Easy to draw. Easy to test. Easy to explain without clearing the room.
The actual physics, worked out by Maxwell 150 years ago, is harder to picture: energy travels in electromagnetic fields that wrap around the wire, not through it. The conductor doesn’t carry the electricity – it shapes and guides an invisible field moving through the space surrounding it.
Electrons drift at about one inch per hour. The field propagates at near light speed. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a completely different mechanism.
So why does everyone – textbooks, regulations, tech support scripts, internet experts – still recite the simple version?
Because updating the story would require effort. And effort has no constituency.
The Anatomy of Institutional Laziness
This isn’t conspiracy. It’s something more banal: a teaching shortcut that calcified into an industry-wide operating system because fixing it is everyone’s problem and no one’s job.
*Education* took the first shortcut. The simplified model doesn’t require vector calculus, so it survives freshman physics. Professors assume students will encounter the real version later. Most never do – and the ones who do rarely connect it back to practical systems.
*Regulations* copied the homework. Electrical codes, safety standards, and utility billing were written in electron-flow language decades ago. Revising them would mean lawyers, committees, liability reviews. Easier to leave it alone.
*Industry* went along to get along. Cable companies market copper purity and gauge because that’s what the simplified model says matters. Explaining that geometry and dielectric materials shape the actual energy field would require contradicting what customers were taught in school. That’s a sales problem no one wants.
*Measurement culture* built its identity around the shortcut. Standard test equipment measures resistance, capacitance, inductance – the parameters the simplified model cares about. When something doesn’t appear on that equipment, the culture declares it nonexistent. Not because they investigated and ruled it out, but because investigating would require new equipment, new methods, new thinking.
*Online enforcement* handles the rest. Question the simplified model publicly and watch the semicredentialed defenders swarm. They’re not protecting truth. They’re protecting the version of truth that doesn’t require them to revisit what they learned.
*Even AI* absorbed the laziness. Language models trained on human knowledge inherit human shortcuts. The simplified model dominates the training data, so AI repeats it – and flags the accurate version as fringe.
Nobody planned this. The system simply optimized for the path of least resistance, and the path of least resistance is always the story that’s already winning.
What the Correct Model Would Require
If you take Maxwell seriously – and every working RF engineer, antenna designer, and EMC specialist does – then the things that shape the electromagnetic field start to matter:
Geometry: Conductor spacing, twist, and arrangement determine how the field distributes
Dielectrics: The material around the conductor affects field propagation as much as the conductor itself
Proximity: Nearby conductors, ground planes, and chassis interact with the field
Vibration: Mechanical movement alters geometry at micro scales, modulating the field
Shielding topology: Not just presence or absence, but how shield boundaries shape field behavior
These aren’t speculative. They’re standard considerations in high-frequency design and precision instrumentation. The only question is whether they matter at audio frequencies and typical cable lengths – and that’s an empirical question that can only be answered by experiments designed around the field model, not by tests built on the simplified one.
But designing those experiments would require admitting the simplified model doesn’t cover everything. That’s uncomfortable. So it doesn’t happen.
The Circular Trap
The system protects its own laziness with a neat closed loop:
- Everyone learns the simplified model
- Measurements are designed to test the simplified model
- Effects outside that model don’t register on those measurements
- Anything that doesn’t register gets declared nonexistent
- Anyone citing the underlying physics gets dismissed as a crank
This looks like rigor. It’s actually a tautology dressed up as skepticism.
The measurements never interrogated the relevant variables. They confirmed what they were designed to confirm, and the culture treated that confirmation as comprehensive.
Why It Won’t Fix Itself
Correcting the record would require effort from people with no incentive to make it:
- Educators would have to rebuild curricula
- Standards bodies would have to revise documents that have been stable for decades
- Manufacturers would have to re-explain products in language that contradicts customer expectations
- Measurement advocates would have to expand their frameworks
- Online experts would have to admit they were defending an incomplete model
- Nobody’s career advances by taking on that project. Everyone’s career is fine leaving it alone.
So the correct physics – 150 years old, mathematically exact, used daily by RF engineers – stays quarantined in advanced coursework. And the simplified version keeps running the world, not because it’s right, but because being wrong together is more cost-effective than rewiring a global infrastructure.
The Point
The energy is in the field. The wire shapes it. Maxwell proved this before Edison commercialized the light bulb.
Everything built on the electron-flow story – the textbooks, the codes, the equipment, the arguments – is institutional inertia dressed up as settled science.
The science was settled long ago. The institutions were just too lazy to notice. 😅
Discussion