Fun fact: when they were still figuring out electricity they didn’t have a proper understanding of electrons so they wrote all electric diagrams with the assumption that something was going from the positive side to the negative side. We’ve known that electrons have a negative charge and move from negative to positive for quite a while now but conventional electrical diagrams are still backwards to the flow of the electrons to this day.
When you get into electrochemistry, the answer becomes complicated. Positively charged molecules move too, and in semiconductors there’s such thing as a ‘hole’ - an absence of electron in a densely packed electron field - which carries charge as if it were a real particle.
Fun fact: when they were still figuring out electricity they didn’t have a proper understanding of electrons so they wrote all electric diagrams with the assumption that something was going from the positive side to the negative side. We’ve known that electrons have a negative charge and move from negative to positive for quite a while now but conventional electrical diagrams are still backwards to the flow of the electrons to this day.
We call this “technical” and “physical” direction of flow
Or “real” and “conventional”
When you get into electrochemistry, the answer becomes complicated. Positively charged molecules move too, and in semiconductors there’s such thing as a ‘hole’ - an absence of electron in a densely packed electron field - which carries charge as if it were a real particle.