Watch electricity hit a fork in the road at half a billion frames per second [video] | Hacker News Reader

Watch electricity hit a fork in the road at half a billion frames per second [video]

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97 pointssystemstops17 comments

That graph animation is pretty mind blowing to watch, especially knowing it’s captured off real data not just the theory.

All his videos are great in general.

It's really incredible to see. And probably the first ever visual demonstration of it.

No wonder electrical engineering design is so difficult for real world, complex, circuits, if it takes roughly 8 cycles for the electrical properties and the wave motion to stabilize. The amount of resistors, transistors seemingly randomly piled up all over a circuit board makes a lot more sense now.

And that is without any (additional) inductance/capacitance, secondary circuits, discrete components, ICs, etc.

Analog gets really weird. Digital is just a funky abstraction on top of analog.

I always wondered why digital signaling is always purported to be better than analog when analog can always carry much more data than digital. But maybe noise elimination of digital signaling is just too important.

Digital simplifies the design a great deal. Analog you have to worry about so, so many things. With digital, as long as the levels aren't too out of whack, you can "just" focus on the theoretical logic and ignore most real-world effects.

I say "just" not only because the theoretical logic is still fiendishly complex, but also because there are still real-world effects and flaws in your components which both rear their ugly head often (all abstractions are leaky). You can never completely ignore the analog world, but digital design is almost always much, much simpler than analog for anything beyond rudimentary levels of complexity.

Obviously if you're designing the silicon for digital components, you care very much about the analog reality of signals. But those silicon wizards are the ones who are building the digital abstraction of the analog world so that the rest of us can "safely" ignore it, mostly.

Digital allows simple and easy reasoning and logic. Which allows perfect duplication, checksumming, repeating, etc.

Something impossible to do with analog, due to the processing model.

Digital is built on analog primitives of course.

I love all his videos. But this one is amazingly mind-expanding. Thanks to his previous videos and a fluids engineering background, I had the right intuition for what would occur...but holy shit his experimental method was so far beyond what I expected. I kept wondering how he was going to show us the level of detail he was teasing in the title and introduction, and seeing the resulting visualization was just so incredible and inspirational.

Really he may be the best technical YouTuber for true nerds who don't want things dumbed-down but still want it to be reasonably accessible.

Amazing video. It’s like one can see the universe thinking in real time.

https://www.videogist.co/videos/watch-electricity-hit-a-fork...

Amazing, but that's a lot of channels for a cheap oscilloscope. I'm curious how he did that, I don't see any wiring. Also, he missed an opportunity to bring in the rudiments of transmission line theory -- a twisted pair is a continuum limit of tiny coupled capacitors. And these same kinds of waves can propagate in the vacuum, which is a kind of universal 3D grid of coupled harmonic oscillators. In which case we call the waves photons!

Recorded seperate samples for each test location, and then wrote visualization software that recombined those recorded traces.

Because there is no real reason for two different runs to be significantly different, (especially if the electronic switch shorts out the source ends of the wires between each test to discharge any capacitance that built up between the wires), the results should not be much different than if using an 80 channel scope.

Except the battery will get run down over time, and won't produce the same voltage at the same speed for the 80th run as it does for the first. You need a benchtop power supply for that.

So.. Ignoring em effects it really behaves a liquid from another dimension

The video is half an hour long. Does anybody have a timestamp of when the event in the title happens?

It starts at about 13 minutes in.

I got some bullshit modal about my adblocker and the last three free videos. Is the specific to this video? Do you tubers have to turn it on?

No it's not. YouTube started rolling this out a couple of weeks (months?) ago. No they don't.

Current UBlock Versions should block this AdBlock Blocker haha

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