Electricity as a set of particles travels slower than the speed of light, but information being transmitted through wires electrically is carried by an electromagnetic wave... which travels at the speed of light.
It's all levels of abstractions, as I'm sure you're aware (especially given your forum Handle!)
First you're taught about electricity like water travelling through pipes, then you're told it isn't really like that. You start off thinking of electricity travelling from positive to negative, then you're told it's electrons travelling from negative to positive, then you're told it's electron
holes shuffling in the opposite direction, which indeed is transmitted at 'c' between shuffling electrons, but doesn't take into account the physical movement of the point charges that are interesting wave-particle hybrids and their path around the material they are flowing through, which (give or take an technical aspect) is part of what gives resistance ...
When you're learnign about superconductors you understand it differently again (starting off with Copper Pairs, etc, which involves making a latice with the positive nucleuses, more or less, given that superconductivity is sensitive to the mass of the ions, given like-for-like isotopes, and there's still a speed limit, just not an appreciable energy loss) and then when you think you know how it
really is, suddenly you learn it's different still, but I'm not going into things at that level. Depending on who you talk to, the next few levels up the "ladder of more accurate theories" get stranger or just more abstract and unprovable, anyway, and I'm probably a few years out of date and not being correct enough anyway to satisfy those with the pedants with "current knowledge" (if you'll excuse the pun).
When I was young, I was convinced that a desne enough medium could transmit information faster than light. After all, sound travels faster through water than through air, and faster still through an iron bar, so eventually you could create something (I suppose I was heading towards the idea of something like Neutronium) that was so dense that a push/tap at on end would produce an oupout of some kind at the other. Of course, apart from being mildly optomistic about the availability of the material (and/or ease of handling) and of the need to overcome the immense inertia the material would possess, the fact that the transmission of 'pressure' across the interatomic (or even subatomic) gaps was limited to the universal speed limit of electromagnetic, strong, weak or even gravitational force betwixt two points did not occur to me. Though I was also pursuing the idea of a more attainable material whose density slowed the Local Speed Of Light to below that of the Local Speed Of Sound, and that's been attained (with Bose Einstein condensates, I think it was), so I guess I wasn't entirely wrong!
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress development + Moore's Law = ??? (Read 10058 times)