this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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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.
It's funny to think that all electrical components, including diodes are engineered in a way where wiring them up the "wrong way" according to human intuition but correctly according to the schematics, makes the whole thing work. Then we decided to throw negative DC voltages or AC into the mix to make things even more confusing, which essentially just shift the reference point for what we would usually consider as "ground" in a circuit. All of this just to make the math work out in the end, and I think that's pretty neat.
Before we had diodes in our curriculum i was curious how one would wire them up or mark them on diagrams considering they were inherently polarized, given how electron flow is opposite to conventional. I was quite delighted to see the P/N semiconductor types making it immediately evident
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.