this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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So, it doesn't actually change anything; everything still works the same.
But textbooks need to be thrown away and remade, every circuit diagram, every electrical engineering plan, decades of research and research papers have to be combed and corrected, or accept that they're wrong.
While technically possible, it would create colossal risk and unending chaos and It's environmentally unsound, for something that doesn't change anything in the end.
Lazy is not checking your mail.
Refusing to turn reality on its head for a null change in the end is something else entirely.
I do agree with you, just want to give voice to the other side of this. Don't underestimate just how much of a barrier this confusion is in teaching. It's confusing. Students who are new to electricity almost universally hate this, and in some cases it can cause misunderstanding, miscommunications, etc. There is a genuine cost to this mislabeling, and there would have been effectively no cost if electrons' charge was considered positive instead of negative.
As I said, I do agree that in practice, with all the existing knowledge, writings and technologies that all agree that electrons are negative, it would be a global disaster if the labeling was switched. There's no question about it. But I kind of disagree about "null change", it's true that it wouldn't change what we can create or (almost) any of our equations, but it absolutely would make it easier to teach it to future generations.
My electronics teacher weathered it pretty well.
This is a basic circuit. These are how the electric and magnetic fields work. Oh and Franklin fucked up a long time ago, made a guess, and he guessed wrong. So, realistically, electrons flow from negative to positive, and the holes they leave behind flow from positive to negative. (he had already covered PN junctions so it scanned) It doesn't change the math or anything, just know that electron flow is negative to positive and that's the last you'll hear of it. And we all said that's dumb. And now, in my life, this is like the 5rd time I've talked about it since I learned it in 1992.
They don't have to remake the textbooks in some cases - I've seen electronics (college) textbooks that were printed in 2 different versions for Electron Flow and Hole Flow.