"Nelson" wrote in message
.com...
On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:23:58 -0500, spamtrap1888 wrote
(in article
):

Drilling down to bedrock is not always the best way to learn
something. As a kid, the current convention always bothered me,
because I knew current was a flow of electrons, and electrons
went the other way. Did current reflect a hole-centric way of looking
at things?

No. See below.

I still find myself occasionally getting momentarily hung up on this...
and I have Master's Degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics :-)
I have always found "holes" counterintuitive. It's too bad the
conventions didn't evolve so that they were consistent with the
underlying physics. It's as if we defined the basic unit of heat as
the "friggie" so that when a body heated up, we would say it lost so
many friggies.

Positive and negative, as you point out, are misnamed. This is supposedly
the fault of B. Franklin, who said that electrical particles flowed from an
source with an excess to a sink with fewer -- which is basically correct. He
called the excess side "positive", not knowing that the charge of the
electrical particles would eventually be called "negative".

BY CONVENTION, current flows from positive to negative. This has never much
bothered me, nor has hole flow. (A hole is a place in the lattice where an
electron "should" be.)

Now, if someone could explain exactly how -- on a quantum level -- junction
transistors work -- I would be delighted. I've yet to find a book that makes
it clear. (FETs are easy.)