Comments by "Peter deWolf" (@StoneShards) on "What is CURRENT– electric current explained, electricity basics" video.

What is the SPEED of electric current?!
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@karhukivi <--Thanks for the engagement, George...this issue perplexes me. Electron drift is normal electron movement, outside of the influence of a voltage differential; super slow, it would take months for an electron to travel the length of a resistor. However, electron current in a conductor in response to a voltage differential is a different story--the speed I see quoted is 96% of the speed of light--which is necessary if our electrical equations are to make intuitive sense at all. Current, though, is time-linked, mathematically; it would appear that current can travel at different rates according to circuit details. A capacitor takes time to charge/discharge; and that time is determined by current density to a great degree. The idea that electric current in a circuit travels very slowly just doesn't WORK! Oh, and from what I've read, your figure of "1 mph" is a couple orders of magnitude greater than the actual case.
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@karhukivi <--Hahaha...Yep...my thinking cap doesn't seem to work as well in retirement as it seemed to before! That still seems really fast compared to what I'd found in my earlier researches, but I'm not a physicist, so I'll defer to you on this, especially since it doesn't really affect my case: how fast are electrons moving from one atom to another under voltage motivation? "Much faster than otherwise" has to be the answer, somehow...I always think about the case of short-circuit behavior. Electrons are drifting happily in the wire until it's connected across, say, a large voltage. Then...WHAT? Vsource has a huge collection of electrons to present to the wire. There seems to be a virtually instantaneous "current response at every point on even a very LONG wire. I'm left to imagine how that can be possible when the electrons in Vsouce haven't had enough time to get to the other end of the wire before the effect of the current can be detected there. It seems observably true that current travels FAST, not slow...
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