Veritasium
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2021–2026
14:48 · 28M views · Nov 19, 2021
Veritasium argues that electric energy is carried by fields around the wires rather than by electrons moving through them, using a thought experiment with a large circuit.
Often recommended as an eye-opening field-based explanation of electricity, though it was also controversial and criticized as pedantic.
15 comments from Hacker News
The video in question for reference: [LINK] Interestingly, when I saw that I figured this channel for a goner because he was going to turn to the darkside, but quite contrary to expectations I feel like his channel has actually blossomed since then. His older videos are fine, but often just explaining concepts that you can find a lot of other explanations on, but some of his recent videos have rocked the boat even among physicists and IMHO he was ultimately proved to be correct for them. I particularly point at his videos about how nobody has measured the one-way speed of light ( [LINK] ), which was well-known among people very very deep in the field of relativity but not very well known outside of that (even amongst physicists in other fields, let alone lay people) and the electricity videos he's done in the last year ( this video , [LINK] ) which attracted a whole whackload of "debunking" videos, which were themselves wrong (the best "bunking" video, if I may call it that, is probably AlphaPheonix's: [LINK] , since he actually set up the experiment, albeit on a smaller scale). They aren't all of that caliber, but the knot theory video was very good too and not something I've seen a hundred times elsewhere, and the airships video that preceded that one clearly had a high degree of research put into it beyond just the hype.
Only tangentially related, but I highly recommend watching Veritasium's YouTube video on electricity if you're curious as to how Maxwell's fields create the current / amp abstractions in EE [1]. It's a common misconception that electrons or current transfer energy. In reality it's the electric field that exists between the wires that is doing the heavy lifting, the electrons in the wires are just controlling the field. This has always confused me and I was very irritated when I first learned electromagnetics about how rote all the initial learnings are. I wish more work was put earlier into making everything relate back to Maxwell's equations to make it make sense. [1] this video
The problem with (or the advantage of) the water flowing analogy, or even more broadly the discrete element model, is that it explains reality good enough to be used in most practical situations. Schematics are ubiquitous, yes they are "fake", but they are also usually "correct enough". Kind of like the incorrect Bohr's model of electrons orbiting the nucleus actually does explain the emission spectra (up to a point). But there is an accessible video that explains electricity pretty well. Veritasium - The Big Misconception About Electricity: this video There is one commonly used concept that requires understanding electricity correctly, and not just as a combination of waterhoses and gizmos. It's impedance, and it directly corresponds to the "controversial" experiment that Veritasium is proposing in his video. Impedance breaks the pipe-of-electrons analogy.
I dove deep into this topic after reading your post and discovered something fascinating: electricity doesn't actually flow through wires in the conventional way I was taught. It's more about the electromagnetic field around the wire. This video explains it really well: this video
There's also the field theory of electricity: this video It’s an eye opening alternative explanation to the electrons flowing like a chain theory of this article.