What is Electricity Part 4: How to Count & Quantify Electricity. What is Electrical Charge? SI Units

[Music] hello and welcome to this electrical principles training video in this video we're going to start discussing how we quantify electricity or in other words how we count how much electricity there is there'll also be an opportunity to start filling in our sr units worksheet so make sure you've downloaded it by clicking the link below

if you haven't done so already now in a previous video we saw that electricity is a flow of negatively charged electrons and the thing that makes it quite tricky for us to start quantifying or counting how much electricity there is is that electrons are small really really small to try and help you get your head around

just how small they are we're going to carry out a thought experiment we're going to go back to thinking about atoms for a moment instead of electrons remember electrons are a small part of an atom so let's do a thought experiment this is an experiment not competition so please don't claim a prize here but let's say that i

would give you one atom of gold for every second that the universe has existed now how much gold do you think that would be either in weight or in value now before you answer think about how long the universe has existed for most current estimates state that it's around 13 billion 700 million

and 11 years old i can be that accurate because i read in the book 11 years ago that it was 13 billion 700 million years old but take that number and times it by the number of days in a year by the number of hours in a day minutes in an hour and seconds in a

minute if you do that calculation then you get 432 quadrillion so 432 quadrillion atoms of gold that's a lot of atoms but how much gold do you think it represents do you think maybe it's the the full stock at fort knox do you think maybe it's just the size of my wedding ring here