The Biggest Misconception About Electricity

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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