The Biggest Misconception About Electricity

Good intrpduction are Veritasium videos: "How Electricity Actually Works" link "The Biggest Misconception About Electricity" ▶ this video

So if I understand this correctly, the information is moving along the wire, at a speed between 60 to 100% of c. This brings me to a Veritasium video of a few years back that I didn't quite understand at the time. [1] The claim being made was that if you connected a light bulb to a switch, with 300'000 km of wire left and right, and if the switch and the light bulb were 1 m away, the light would turn on in 1/c seconds. But this would imply that the information travel is not along the wires, but straight from the switch to the light bulb? [1] ▶ 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.

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

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 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.

Sorry, can you explain? My understanding is that transistors don't "dump" electrons anywhere. The gate controls the voltage, which in the `0` state forces resistance to be high enough s.t. current flow through that transistor stops. As the Veritasium video explains [0], current flow is not a literal flow of electrons, but a state of the electromagnetic field (or something to that effect... it's been many years since my electromagnetism university courses). [0]: ▶ this video

Circuit theory is demonstrably wrong. The energy doesn't flow inside of a wire, it flows around the wire. link ▶ this video It is a very useful tool in practica.

I suppose this one isn't too bad in that regard, I think I was mainly thinking of this video: ▶ this video This video about leaded gasoline makes a solid case and the science and history are there to back up that Kettering caused the lead poisoning on this scale, but I think it's a stretch, or a gross oversimplification to say he killed the most people in history. I guess I expect slightly more scientific rigor and caution from someone like him (though, I understand that YouTube videos aren't expected to withstand the scientific method). With this video, I think it comes down to the title. Saying he killed the most people is a reach, I think saying he poisoned the most people is probably more accurate. That's not saying anything to discredit how bad lead poisoning is and that it does kill people, but if you're going to accuse someone of being a mass murderer I think you need to make your claims really precisely and have data that really clearly shows a causation and not just correlation. The video titles ironically seemed to get more clickbait-y after he released this video: link

Nit pick… Technically it’s not “through” the electrical wires, it’s actually through the electrical field created around the electrical wires. Veritasium explains ▶ this video

> Anything involving the electrical energy not inside wires has no water analogue (ie the electromagnetic waves inside a transformer) You don't even need fancy things like transformers for energy not in the wires to be important. Even a simple DC circuit consisting of a battery in series with a light bulb mostly involves an electromagnetic field to transfer energy from the battery to the light bulb, which mostly takes place outside the wires. The function of the wires when it comes to energy transfer is to carry moving charge which creates the magnetic part of the electromagnetic field that actually carries the transferred energy. Here's a pretty good explanation [1]. That video was from January 2019, and not controversial. Veritasium did a video on the topic in late 2021 that didn't really present things as well and ended up being quite controversial [2]. Other well-known YouTube channels such as EEVblog [3] and ElectroBOOM [4] responded. There was also someone who bought a bunch of wire and did the experiment as described in the Veritasium video (although scaled down). That was discussed on HN and that discussion contains some very interesting links [5]. In particular the link to a talk by Rick Hartley in this subthread is very informative [6]. He talks about how most EMI problems in PCB designs are due to people not taking into account the the energy is not in the wires. [1] link [2] ▶ this video [3] link [4] link [5] link [6] link

this is an interesting video (to me anyway!!) on the speed of electrons vs fields The Big Misconception About Electricity.. ▶ this video

The term 'transmission line theory' (or even 'transmission' for that matter) doesn't appear to have been mentioned in the video at all[0], and this is a complaint that was also raised by Dave Jones[1] in his critique of sorts. The video is fundamentally about transmission line problems and the term is mentioned both in the description and the word document containing further analysis, but its omission does lend some credibility to the complaints in the parent comments that the video style is intentionally pedantic (it is a pure physics vs practical electrical engineering take after all) and presented as a controversy which comes off as a bit shallow as a result. If one were to put on a tinfoil hat it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to imagine that the plan was to have a follow up video to settle the controversy with the gist of the video being about transmission line theory and concluding with a practical demonstration of the effect. [0] I don't have the time to carefully watch a 15 minute video to verify this, and demonstrating a lack of evidence seems difficult, but the subtitles for the video can easily be downloaded with youtube-dl and then grepped or opened with a regular text editor. Note that these subtitles are manually written and not auto-generated by youtube, and while it's possible there's some differences in the script and what is said it seems unlikely. youtube-dl --write-sub --sub-lang en --skip-download ▶ this video grep -i 'transmission' 'The Big Misconception

That's not exactly correct. Electrons don't flow through wires - there's a one-way flow of the ambient electrons around the wire from the field created. See here: ▶ this video