How Wrong Is Veritasium? A Lamp and Power Line Story [video]

The entire universe is one single immensely complex circuit. There are no conductors or insulators, just one giant RLC network. This is a perfectly valid, yet extraordinarily pedantic way of viewing electronics (unless you're one of the dark wizards of RF).

The battery in your cell phone right now is in some non-zero way also powering the lights in your room. Each keypress on your keyboard registers in the heater of your neighbors coffee machine. They're all part of the same singular universal circuit.

Veritasium just ran with this pedantic tidbit to make a flashy controversial video. Which he didn't even get fully right because like Electro pointed out, there is always non-zero current flowing in everything. The lamp never "turns on" because it always was "on".

As an electronics guy, the veritasium video just made my eyes roll.

should i watch the veritasium video and then this correction or just keep my ignorant/old-fashioned way of thinking about electrons and electrons holes switching places

btw my favorite, most illuminating source of electrical knowledge is the book “There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings”