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But good sir, what is electricity?
A quick look at the physics of conductors, insulators, and electric charges.
Today, it’s no longer believed that electrons zoom around the nucleus in circles; instead, they appear to settle into oddly-shaped orbitals that represent solutions to an underlying wave function — but don’t map to a trajectory of a discrete particle in classical mechanics. This brings us to solid-state insulators: in such materials, valence electrons can still be pulled off or deposited onto the surface with relative ease, but the resulting charges stay in place and can’t propagate through the bulk of the substrate. The atoms form a dense, homogeneous lattice with sparsely-populated orbitals that essentially merge together, extending throughout the material and no longer exhibiting clearly-quantized energy levels that are characteristic of electrons bound to a single nucleus.
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