What Is "Electricity"? (1996)(electricatechnology.com)

What is electricity? This question is impossible to answer because the
word "Electricity" has several contradictory meanings. These
different meanings are incompatible, and the contradictions confuse
everyone. If you don't understand electricity, you're not alone. Even
teachers, engineers, and scientists have a
hard time
grasping the concept.

Obviously "electricity" cannot be several different things at the same
time. Unfortunately we've defined the word Electricity in a
crazy way. Because the word lacks one distinct meaning, we
can never pin down the nature of electricity. In the end we're forced to
declare that there's no such stuff as "electricity" at all! Here's a
quick example to illustrate the problem.

Below are the five most common meanings of the word Electricity.
Which one do you think is right? Think about this carefully, because if
one of
these meanings is correct, all the others must be wrong! After all, no
"science term" must ever possess several conflicting definitions.
Unfortunately our dictionaries and encyclopedias contain all of these
contradictions. (Click the links to find out more about each.)

If we wish to agree on a single correct definition of "electricity," which
definition should we choose? The Scientific version, number one above?
But that would mean that all of our books are wrong, since books insist
that electricity is the energy, or that electricity is the motion
of charges: the current.
Except for the CRC Handbook and the NIST SI
physics standards,
the few textbooks which do use the scientific definition are all seventy
years old, or older.

Well, maybe we don't need to choose just one definition. Could we mix
them? Could we let Electricity be an "elastic term?" Suppose we ignore
all these contradictions and instead pretend that all of the above
definitions are true. Below is the "clear" and "simple" description of
electricity which results:

Instead, approximately ten separate things have the name
"electricity." There's no single stuff called "electricity."
electricity does not exist. Franklin, Edison, Thompson, and
millions of
science teachers should've had a long talk with Mrs. McCave before they
decided to give one single name to a large variety of independent
science concepts.

Mrs. McCave was invented by Dr. Seuss. She had twenty three sons.
She named them all "Dave."

Whenever we ask "What Is Electricity," that's just like asking Mrs. McCave
"who is dave?" How can she describe her son? There can be no answer
since the question itself is wrong. It's wrong to ask "who is Dave?"
because we're silently assuming that there's only one Dave, when actually
there
are many different people. They all just happen to be named Dave. Who
is Dave? Mrs. McCave cannot answer us until she first corrects our
misunderstanding. Dave doesn't exist. She wishes she'd given them all
separate names.

For the same reason, we'll never find a simple answer to the question
"what is electricity?" because the question itself is wrong. First we
must realize that "electricity" does not exist. There is no single
thing named "electricity." We must accept the fact that, while several
different
things do exist inside wires, people wrongly call all of them by a
single name.

So never ask "what is electricity". Instead, discard the word
"electricity" and begin using the correct names for all the separate
phenomena. Here are a few of them:

The above questions all have sensible answers. But if you ask
what is electricity?, then all of the answers you'll find will just confuse you,
and you'll never stop asking that question.

OK, how about the following analogy. What is a crane? Simple! A crane
is a kind of migratory waterbird which is made of steel truss, lives on
diesel fuel, frogs and small fish, is typtically hundreds of feet tall,
and is found
both in wetlands and city construction sites. Cranes are very simple to
understand. If you cannot imagine a 500ft steel waterbird striding across
the wetlands while lifting huge i-beams and eating frogs, you must not be
very smart. I'm an expert on cranes, so it cannot possibly be my own
explanation which is flawed. It must be you who simply cannot
grasp these obvious concepts.

In fact, the above "cranes" do not exist, and neither does "electricity."
Both are collections of completely separate concepts, but where we've
given them the same name. Construction cranes are not waterbirds, in the
same way that flowing energy (watts) is not flowing charge (amperes.)
If a flow of electricity is an electric current, then electricity cannot
be a form of energy. (Yet everyone wants to believe in giant steel
waterbirds, since that was what we were all taught as children. That
many books couldn't be wrong! Yet they are. There's actually two
separate things flowing along the wires, one moving fast, the other going
extremely slow, with both named "electricity." )

The physicist Richard Feynman has his own take on this. What is
Wakalixes? Talk to the experts, read the books, and you'll only become
confused. Everyone argues about the true nature of Wakalixes, and
experts give contradictory explanations. but they adamantly refuse to
agree upon a simple definition of the word, and Wakalixes lacks any narrow
scientific definition. (Feynman was complaining about K6 textbooks'
idiotic use of the word "energy," but his reasoning equally applies to
their crazy, impossible explanations of "electricity." The crane is a
simple beast, made of steel, yet covered in feathers...)

MORE ABOUT "ELECTRICITY" 30 misconceptions that screwed *me* up.