I mean, to be fair the water pipe analogy is pretty good as the pressure performs work done per unit volume, and voltage is work done per unit charge which takes up a specific volume of the wire.
But you’re right, with A.C. that analogy gets complicated unless supposedly you had water going back and forth in the pipe, but that is still transmitting energy like a wave does.
phr@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
like any good model it has it’s scope. inductivity and capacity are out of scope. electrical current is not electrons pushing each other as a longitudinal wave in water could make it wiggle in a pipe. as soon as something stops to make sense in the model we need a new model.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 3 days ago
I always see analogies as he effective at their chosen level of resolution (similar to your scale).
At dinner-table-conversation level, or 5 year old kid level, these water analogies work.
If you need to actually produce something, they’re completely useless.
But for most stuff/people, Newtonian analogies work surprisingly well, so long as we always qualify it with “remember, this isn’t actually how it works, this is just an analogy to get you closer to how it works”.