Electricity: I was wondering, whether we can pass electricity through air over a distance of 100 meters or so as electricity means the flow of electrons and we have seen the discharge or movement of electrons in a cathode ray tube
[Physics] Can we pass electricity through air
electric-circuitselectricityelectrons
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Interesting, but I'm don't think you are asking the right questions in the context of law.
The point is that electrons and electricity are completely irrelevant when it comes to the question of "tangible" and "electronic" "goods". You will obtain a good answer only if you forget about electricity, which just happens to be a convenient physical carrier of information, and focus on the objects that might or might not be goods like a chair or a pen. A proper question would be this: "Is a newspaper article a good, like a chair or a pen?". Specifying whether the newspaper article is written on paper or "on electrons" or on something else is besides the point because the concept of "newspaper article" is entirely independent of the material it is written on.
To put it more pointedly: if you have to know the metaphysical nature of electricity to make a law about newspapers, you're definitely doing it wrong. ;-)
Keeping in mind that your questions and their answers are completely useless in the context of law, I can now proceed to answer them.
I don't know of any good analogy to electricity that captures it properly. It is like gravitation in that distant bodies attract each other, except that in electricity, bodies can also repel each other. Furthermore, the gravitational pull of, say, a chair is so small that we don't think of a chair as attracting us gravitationally. This is also why the water analogy doesn't work so well: water does not attract other water from afar. The "cause" for attraction/repulsion is the electrical charge.
The carriers of charge, like electrons or ions (= atoms with electrons missing) do have a mass. You can think of them as tiny, charged balls flying around through space (keep in mind that a copper wire consist of mostly empty space, too). On the other hand, electrical current does not have a mass, just like a water current does not have a mass, it simply doesn't make sense. (Both imply a mass current, however.) Likewise, electricity is a general term and does not have a mass, just like "law" and "liberty" don't have a mass.
The mass of a copper wire is the sum of the masses of its constituents, some of which are electrons. However, the number electrons exiting a copper wire is usually the same as the number of electrons entering the copper wire, so its mass does not change. In any case, the mass of electrons is way too small to make more than a negligible contribution to the total mass of the wire anyway.Again, "electricity" is a general term. The link you mentioned refers to electric current, which is the same as flow of charge. Basically, the link says that electrons are not the only tiny balls that carry a charge. This is indeed the case. It's just that in the common case of metals, electrical current is usually carried by electrons.
This question is not well-posed. Again, electricity is a very general term and encompasses things like electric field, electric current, electric charge etc. For instance, light is part of electricity as well, because it's an electromagnetic wave.
Earthing something means dumping the electron flow into the earth. Since the earth is so big, it can absorbe/give a practically infinite amount of charge without changing potential, this means that you can treat earth as a reservoir of ready to use electrons.
If you plug the phase of your home power line into the ground (without safety devices in the middle), you are actually dumping the electrons in the earth. (In reality -since we use AC- you are repeatedly dumping and taking back electrons 50 times per second).
Note: the other wire of the power line that gets to your home is connected to earth at the nearest distribution node.
Best Answer
The cathode ray tube has had the air pumped out. Electrons scatter off oxygen and nitrogen molecules so if you fired an electron beam in air it would be scattered in a short distance. The distance would depend on the beam energy, but it's a lot shorter than 100m. The range of electrons from beta radiation in air is around a metre.
You could argue that lightning is the conduction of electricity through air, though I don't think anyone has ever seriously proposed this as a method for passing electricity through air in domestic applications.