Kind of weird to explain electricity without explaining electric charge. Electrons are only half the story: you need protons for the full picture. Positive and negative charges, voltage as electric potential difference, electric current as the flow of electric charge, Ohm’s law, Kirchhoff’s voltage and current laws…
Also it’s rather misleading to talk about the flow of electrons in an electric circuit. Electrons tend to move extremely slowly through a circuit (drift velocity) because of their high frequency of collisions. The reason a light turns on so quickly when we flick the switch is the same reason water comes out of the tap so quickly after we turn on the faucet: what’s moving quickly is not the individual electrons, it’s the propagation of a wave.
Immediate questions of “what’s an electron, or charge, or work, or conductivity, or…”
I SAID NO FOLLOWUPS GOOD SIR
Or electricity. He probably meant amber.
Hey, ChatGPT. Explain electricity to someone living in Ancient Rome.
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Good thing my phone has an offline LLM, image generator, and English Wikipedia, and I have a power bank!
Ah yes english wikipedia, much use among romans… If they havent killed you because of several reasons, you arent even aware of.
And like an LLM takes a lot of power, do you take an outlet with you?
Solar panels
Baby steps. The ancients were familiar with static electricity. Rub a cat with an amber rod. Show them the spark and explain it’s the same thing as lightning, except a billion times smaller.
They were making batteries in clay jars in Baghdad. Make a simple battery. Not sure where to go from there. The light bulb is the killer app though.
Baghdad battery is pseudoarcheology with no actual basis in reality.
Batteries are apparently quite easy to make, though, as long as you have sulfuric acid. It’s been a known substance since antiquity so you could probably get or produce some. They obviously wouldn’t have called it sulfuric acid though
Proper electrochemistry would have also been really easy too, just shove 2 different metals into a box of water with a bit of electrolytes and you’ve got yourself a battery. Not sure if you’d be able to produce enough voltage to do any meaningful work though. Maybe if you hook up a bunch in series
Realistically, I think the limitations of modern technology functioning in the past is not really the knowledge of that technology, but the lack of infrastructure. You can’t make a computer even if you knew how to because the manufacturing infrastructure and supply chains required to build a computer simply doesn’t exist
Yeah, I was just thinking about a simple wind or solar turbine would need an alternator of some kind and I wouldn’t know how to make that.
I’d love to see how a reasonably reliable bicycle made from avaible materials could have changed things
Oh and I bet the romans would love some stuff like a trompe pump
Burn this heretic!
