I was pretty surprised about this since I had mistakenly believed that electrons had a velocity near the speed of light, which I think is only true in particle accelerators.
Indeed - I thought most college Physics 2 courses teach that electrons actually move quite slowly through conductors. It’s the “wave” which propagates near the speed of light, not the particles.
My mistake was being a biologist, and skipping or sleeping my way through the EE part of physics :) and then saying the wrong thing in front of some very smart people
I've had something similar- when I was deciding what grad school to go to, I was explaining how RNA enzymes work to some professor at UC Boulder, who ended up being Tom Cech (who won the Nobel for discovering RNA enzymes); he had to correct a lot of the details I messed up. I ended up going to UCSF and fortunately didn't try to explain prions to Stanley Prusiner.
In short, nearly everything I have learned is from saying dumb things in front of very smart people who instantly understood my misunderstanding and knew exactly how to explain it so I understood. That includes Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff Dean telling me "your idea isn't so good, it's n-squared, here's a linear solution"
AlphaPhoenix did an amazing experiment to measure the speed of electricity FWIW. His other videos are incredible as well and explain EM physics in an absolutely outstanding way.
I was pretty surprised about this since I had mistakenly believed that electrons had a velocity near the speed of light, which I think is only true in particle accelerators.