Travel By Electricity

So, if you want physics accuracy (why do you need that in a comic?) the individual electrons don't go all the way from the power plant to the point of use for the current.  There's a few things going on there.

For starters, in any given bit of wire it's the average motion of the bulk the electrons that's carrying the current.  There's lots of shuffling back and forth.  Think of it almost like a wave in a long slinky where the pushing and pulling of one part affects the next.

Though it's more than that because it's also a bit like heat where there's a lot of shaking around and random motion going on top of all that. 

Then there's the fact that for most of the path we're working on alternating current - where current is sloshing back and forth - in the US it's 60 Hz i.e. 60 times per second.

But that's not all.  In order to transmit electricity over vast distances, despite losing energy by heating up the cable, we send a lot of energy per charge -- a lot of volts.  You don't want 60,000 volts going into your laptop.

Edison worked with direct current and his work around was just to use resistors and let the voltage drop by dissipating more energy away through heat.

Tesla & Westinghouse worked with alternating current and that lets us use transformers, but not the kind from Cybertron.

See  electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin (no wonder Magneto is so powerful).  Electric current produces magnetic fields.  This makes each little atom with it's electrons moving around turn into tiny magnets.

When you run current through a coil, you make a powerful magnet.  When you run _alternating current_ through a coil, that sloshing back and forth makes the magnetic field flip (again 60 times per second in the U.S. grid)

And the nifty thing, is that if you take a coil of wire, flip your magnetic field back and forth by flipping the current back and forth - then you can _induce_ an electric current in a completely separate coil of wire that the magnetic field goes through

And the longer the wire in the coil, the harder it is (more volts needed) to push electric current through (that's resistance).  So you can have two coils:

One you're pushing current through at high voltage, back and forth making a magnetic field going back and forth.  That field is going through a separate wire.  Making current there - but at a different voltage.

So we change the voltage without dumping so much energy into heating things up.  It's more efficient.

But for anyone hitching a ride on an electron.

It's totally different electrons in the power lines outside the building than the ones in the house.

And that's on top of the other stuff with the individual electrons not going as far as the charge and current does and them going back and forth rapidly anyway.

14/end?

Oh.. and then there's the Uncertainty principle -- those electrons aren't in a well defined location either, but I should probably actually grade some tests now & save that for another time.

15/end this time, I mean it.  I have to grade dammit.

Also Storm should have some magnetic powers (but her fields would go in circles around her lightning and be super brief).

If you've made it this far and like comic book physics, you may be into this thread on Cyclops and heat vision from 3 weeks ago which Gail totally said was "The best thread in internet history"

(I refuse to call this 17.  It's not even the same topic)

Oh... I didn't directly respond to the original post which dealt with cable and cell phones for Ryan Choi. So..  here goes

18/$#!+

So first off, unless you're talking about inside the cell phone itself, cell signals are sent through radio waves (i.e. oscillations of electric and magnetic fields).  So... can he ride on photons? Depends on who's writing?

For old school cable, coaxial cable - that's sending electric current one way down the outside & back down the inside, with a magnetic field between that is shielded from the outside. (More that the fields from the inner & outer cables cancel outside and stack inside)

So for traditional cable that is totally not part of the mess that is the Summers' family tree we have the same concerns as with electric power - including being alternating current.

But hey!  Now a lot of cable comes through fiber optics.  Well... there you're switching to photons folks (totally not Captain Marvel), just stuck in a cable (again, not that guy who sometimes runs into Deadpool).  

Also, through a fiber network, you're going to be switching from light to electric current at various places along the way so... that's a challenge for a single power character.  

23/I'm at least pausing here I need to finish breakfast

[I didn't pick it up further]