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Comment by poorman | Hacker News Reader

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHIhgxav9LY

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While true, don't get hung up on it, it's kinda like "I was always taught that computers run python, or javascript, or rust, but today I learned that it's actually all just 1's and 0's"

That is actually a super useful and important insight, because the bridge to get there means unpacking interpretation, compilation, and things like compilation targets and CPU architectures. Not saying you're wrong!

Sure, the analogy I am making is imperfect. In reality, you can be a career electrical engineer and never once come across or need to know the true workings of electricity. The models we are all familiar with cover 99.9999% of use cases.

This spurred on some other videos from another youtuber that goes by AlphaPhoenix, he went way into all the details on it including measuring the complete flow of the wave of the electrical power and how it all works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_crwFuPht4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AXv49dDQJw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-xvL_rYXpE (on his second channel, has a lot of "behind the scenes" of how it was done)

It goes into a lot of depth of how the wave propagates, including measuring it at effectively "a billion fps" (he goes over how he does this) along the wire and how impedance matching works, etc. It's about 2.5 hours of video IIRC but it's probably the most detailed and easy to understand demonstration and explanation of all of it that I've ever seen.

Thanks for the recommendations! Guess I'll be watching all these! ...There goes my day :P

This veritasium video was VERY controversial as it tries to make an edge case into the main thing and trick you.

Also made me unsubscribe from his videos.

I wrote off Veritasium when they ran an advertorial about how incredibly safe self-driving cars are, sponsored by Waymo, mostly just citing Waymos own studies.

Everyone makes errors or decisions you will disagree with from time to time.

If you write people off based on one (or a tiny fraction) of interactions you will be writing off a lot of the world.

I had a similar reaction, though just becoming more skeptical of his videos. It did introduce me into a number of others that presented the counter arguments and more complete demonstrations and explanations of the whole thing that fixed a few of my own mis-understandings about it. I posted a sibling comment to yours about AlphaPhoenix who ended up doing the coolest and most complete demo and measurement of what's going on that I've ever seen.

Yeah, that whole electricity series really put a massive dent in how I viewed all his videos, knocking down veritasium from a 1st rate science channel to a 2nd or 3rd one.

The entire series was predicated on a deeply technical "gotcha" that just caused a bunch of eye rolls from informed viewers.

I thought it was well done

I think it’s useful to point out that in many areas we use a simplified model of the world, because they are much easier to use and the predictions are accurate enough for the intended purposes. But they are not how things actually work, and people forget that.

Interesting, I guess I'll have to dig deeper. I definitely want to understand this better.

“Lumped element model”

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