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To: yard_man who wrote (63886)5/26/2010 6:58:19 PM
From: benwood  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217561
 
I was too colloquial -- the signal (field) is what goes nearly the speed of light, not any actual electrons. Centimeters/sec doesn't jive with what I've read. I just cracked my quantum physics book and the authors there claim (using the Drude model) 108000 meters/s for electrons in some metal wire, which is pretty slow compared to the speed of light but 1 million times faster than you said but also about 25 times slower than I was inferring.

Regardless, that doesn't matter, does it? If you hold the end of a nice fat wire that is 300 million meters long and you are grounded and somebody applies a billion volts charge to the other end you will feel a hole in your body just over one second later.

The rest of what I said I do know and stand by. Whether or not a revolution occurs due to reduced overhead created by quantum anything remains to be seen and is likely to be, in my view, a long way off and rather expensive.