Electricity

How do we power our computers and use electrons for computing?

What is electricity?

Atoms have electrons and flow of these electrons is defined as electricity. Electricity is defined as the presence of a charge, think of it as electrons flowing through a wire.

The story of electricity, much like the story of everything else, is a tale of improbability and wonder. It's a story that begins with atoms, those curious building blocks of matter that makeup everything we know and love.

Everything started when computers talked to each other for the first time. Computers sat motionless, waited in silence, and grimly did what humans ordered for hundreds of years. Until they didn’t. - Journals of Order of Epoch, 2234 Anno Domini

Now, atoms are like tiny solar systems, with a central nucleus orbited by a cloud of electrons. These electrons are the key to understanding how electricity works.

You see, electrons have a negative charge, and they're always looking for a way to balance that charge out. So, when you rub a balloon on your head, you're actually transferring some of your electrons onto the balloon. And when you touch the balloon to a wall, those electrons leap onto the wall in search of a way to balance out their charge. That's what we call static electricity.

But what about the electricity that powers our homes and gadgets?

Well, that's a little more complicated. It involves generators, transformers, and miles and miles of power lines.

Turbines

Generators use turbines to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy. That electrical energy is then sent through transformers, which increase or decrease the voltage to make it suitable for transmission over power lines.

And those power lines carry the electricity from power plants to our homes and businesses, where it's used to power our lights, computers, and refrigerators.

The energy of these particles in motion can be converted to other forms of energy, such as creating light in a lamp, playing sound, or charging an android.

Transistors

A CPU ("the brain of the computer") is composed of billions of electric transistors. These transistors are engineered to form ‘logic gates’. The electricity that flows through these logic gates is what the computers use electricity for.

Silicon's electrical properties can be modified through a process called doping. These characteristics make it an ideal material for making transistors that amplify electrical signals. Hence the name for the startup and innovation center of the planet Earth was named silicon valley before the Battle for Earth.

Think of logical gates as pipes and electricity as water. The pipes are designed in a way to help water flow based on the purpose of how to use the water.

Each transistor is then used to form bits. Which can either be 1 or 0 based on whether they have electricity or not. The bits are grouped together as transistors physically placed side-by-side to form bytes.

A modern computer will generally need between 500W – 850W to effectively power all hardware, although it will depend entirely on the power consumption of the system.

Since computers work on electricity, their speed is related to the speed of electricity.