How Wrong Is VERITASIUM? A Lamp and Power Line Story
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it as the more rigorous, polite and complete treatment of the Veritasium puzzle, though one dissents that the original misleads people.
What it is
ElectroBOOM's Mehdi Sadaghdar responds to Veritasium's lamp-and-long-wire puzzle, analysing it as an electrical engineer. He covers where the original framing misleads and the role of stray capacitance.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2021 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec jacobolus · 2021-12 · on “I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]”
Controversial is fine to the extent the controversy shows people struggling toward clearer understanding and better explanations, and as long as all parties are operating in good faith (i.e. not being deliberately misleading). Let me highly recommend Mehdi Sadaghdar’s (ElectroBOOM) excellent response video [this video] which does a great job of empirically investigating and theoretically explaining the subtleties involved, in a polite, respectful, and entertaining way. I have similarly enjoyed the exchange between Sadaghdar and Steve Mould about the physics of the “chain fountain”. These kinds of friendly scientific “debates” show viewers (e.g. kids) a bit of how the scientific process and scient
Recommends afiori · 2021-12 · on “I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]”
In my opinion the video made a couple of mistakes, which I think ElectroBoom's response* addresses nicely. Also its proof using the pointing vector to show the flow of energy is misleading; In the video Derek shows that the energy flows toward the lamp when the circuit is already in a stable configuration, but the point of the video is to explore what happens before the circuit reaches that configuration. This is relevant: assume that the right half of the cable is connected to the positive pole of the battery, in a stable configuration every point of the right half of the circuit has a positive charge (creating the poynting vector field as shown in the video) while 1/c seconds after the swi
Recommends naasking · 2021-12 · on “I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]”
You should watch Electroboom's analysis if you want the full details from an electrical engineer: [this video]
Recommends haxiomic · 2021-12 · on “Electricity Is Magnetism”
The veritasium video didn’t create a clear picture of what’s going on and you shouldn’t feel bad for feeling more confused after watching it ElectroBOOM has a good response [this video]
Cites tdrdt · 2021-12 · on “I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]”
Medhi Sadaghdar (Electroboom) explains this. Medhi says the video is right but starts with a trick question. That's what the controversy is about. [this video]
Cites Abishek_Muthian · 2021-12 · on “I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]”
> AFAIU, the entire point of the video was to show that electricity travels not through wires but via electric fields ("through the air" so to speak). Only that he doesn't context the video with that, But with a 'trick/googly' question. One of the reasonable constructive criticism I came across for this video is from Mehdi(ElectroBOOM)[1] where he explains why the real answer is not in the options offered by Derrick. Personally I like the quality of Veritasium videos, but I lately feel that the barometer has shifted towards sensationalism rather than scientific education. [1] [this video]
Cites contravariant · 2021-12 · on “Electricity Is Magnetism”
This discussion seems to revolve around Veritasium's video explaining how elecitricty doesn't quite flow inside of power lines. I can't help but feel that "electricity doesn't travel along the wires" is a somewhat unhelpful "well, actually" explanation that kind of misses the point. And you can tell it misses the point because you can't actually carry electricity without free electrons. And at least in part the confusion seems to focus itself around the concept of stray capacitance, which makes it doubly confusing when you illustrate it with circuit diagrams where stray capacitance is deliberately left out. See also ElectroBOOM's rebuttal [1] where he illustrates how the situation can be exp
Cites aemreunal · 2022-01 · on “5.5 mm in 1.25 nanoseconds”
Disclaimer: I don't understand nearly enough about the physics of electricity, but this was a popular response video by ElectroBOOM that Veritasium also responded to in the comments: [this video]