Veritasium
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2023–2026
24:31 · 13M views · Apr 29, 2022
Veritasium explores how electrical energy actually travels in a circuit, arguing that it flows through electromagnetic fields around the wires rather than through the electrons. It builds a long-cable experiment with Caltech to test when a distant bulb lights.
HN cites it for the field-based picture of power transfer, noting it was controversial at release but the experiment largely backed the creator.
12 comments from Hacker News
"How Electricity Actually Works" ( this video ) from Veritasium is related and also a fantastic video.
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 ( [LINK] , this video ) 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.
Sort of, electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin, electromagnetism, so it's waves in the electromagnetic field with the wire acting as a wave guide. (as far as I understand) Veritasium has a video that goes over this. It was pretty controversial at release but it gives a good overview. this video And why magnets work due to relativity [LINK]
Good intrpduction are Veritasium videos: "How Electricity Actually Works" this video "The Biggest Misconception About Electricity" [LINK]
Thanks, quite the useful simulator; I hadn't found that page yet. Additional considerations for circuit simulators: What does the simulator say about signal delay and/or propagation in electronic circuits and their fields? How long does it take for a lightbulb to turn on after a switch is thrown, given the length of the circuit and the real distance between points in it? (I learned this gap in our understanding of electron behavior from this experiment, which had never been done FWIU: "How Electricity Actually Works" (2022) this video ) FWIW, additionally: Hall Effect and Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect; "Tunable superconductivity and Hall effect in a transition metal dichalcogenide" (2025) [LINK] ScholarlyArticle: "Moiré-driven topological electronic crystals in twisted graphene" (2025) [LINK] NewsArticle: "Anomalous Hall crystal made from twisted graphene" (2025) [LINK] From "Single-chip photonic deep neural network with forward-only training" [LINK] : "Fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect in multilayer graphene" (2024) [LINK] "Coherent interaction of a-few-electron quantum dot with a terahertz optical resonator" (2023) [LINK] .. [LINK] > "Room-temperature quantum coherence of entangled multiexcitons in a metal-organic framework" (2024) [LINK] Electrons (and photons and phonons and other fields of particles) are more complex than that though.