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The outer shells on conductive metal atoms are quite a ways (relatively speaking--atoms are really small) from their nuclei. Because of this, the attraction between the electrons in that shell and the nucleus isn't very high, and the electrons form what's called an "electron cloud." Now, the cool thing about electron clouds is that they hold a certain number of electrons and no more--basically, the number of atoms multiplied by the number of electrons in the outer shell...if there are a million atoms in a piece of wire and the outer shell holds four electrons, there are four million electrons in the cloud. (This is a REALLY short piece of wire.) If you hook one side of a power supply and a light bulb to your wire, hook the light bulb to the other side so you have a complete circuit, and start feeding electrons into one end of this cloud, electrons will be forced out the other end to maintain equilibrium and...voila! The light comes on!

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12y ago

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