How Electricity Actually Works

As an electron working in the field, I'm glad we're finally getting the recognition we deserve.

Respect for admiting to some mistakes. It's refreshing to see someone both rationally defend their side and also admit to some mistakes and fix said mistakes.

As an electrician working in the field, I can confidently say: This is above my pay grade.

Your original video has essentially achieved its purpose, you have generated a huge response, and then brought everyone together and the net outcome was to educate people in a deeper way than the average YouTube experience. Always appreciate your work man!

This was a greatly detailed video and I think we are pretty much on the same page! Thanks for the shoutout and going through the trouble of clarification. P.S. by the way, the resistor in your experiment didn't quite match the lien impedance, other you would get half your supply voltage right away. But I mean with such small capacitance and inductances, the probing itself could d have added some parasitic components to the lines. PPS: Like I said above "pretty much on the same page"! It is a complex subject, and I think some nuances could have been addressed better. Maybe Derek and I could sit together and react to nuances to clarify things!

Fantastic revisit! The animations and the simulations were spot-on, and great at showing the difference between the transient “first-second” effect, and the steady-state “rest of time” behavior. The whole “expanding loop of current” thing is a great way to phrase it, because after that poynting loop expands to match the actual physical loop of wire, then stuff starts to behave normally and all of the power is transmitted around the loop very close to the wire. I still hold that for this simple circuit, turning on a lightbulb with wires much smaller around than they are long, the effect of surface charge vs internal charge is negligible, so you can ignore any skin-effect stuff and say that “mobile” electrons are indeed pushing on other “mobile” electrons using their fields, but I totally agree that that’s a simplification, just a simplification that makes the intuition a lot easier. I also need to do some math about how far the average “electron” is displaced in order to build the initial charge distribution around some typical circuit elements - axial flow is the only way I understand those charge distributions getting built, and this whole endeavor has made me think hard about what that means. Someday when I think I understand it better I’ll edit up my pt.2 response video - thanks for the shoutout! I’ve got a great experiment in the works to show the “expanding poynting loop” 😁

Thank you for taking the time to produce and share this video. I've been an EE for close to 20 years and I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that only now am I starting to fully appreciate the importance of E and B fields in the behaviour of circuits.

Being humble to admit your mistakes and learn from other perspectives is what science is all about. No ego, just learning and discovering something new is amazing, our society needs more of this today

This was a good revisit. After watching the original I didn’t feel like it made enough sense. It wasn’t until Alpha Phoenix posted his experiment that I understood the point you were actually aiming for.

This… this is what science is all about. Thought experiment, theory, peer review, experiment. Well done everyone.

This is absolutely brilliant. As a high school science teacher, I have not found a better explanation of how electricity really works - and my students can follow it and learn because it isn’t laden with equations. I applaud you, Derek! Thank you!

When describing circuits, most educators focus on what is happening at the subatomic level (which I love) but not the reasons why particles behave the way they do. I'm often left feeling like I missed something important in Science class — but something so rudimentary that no one will ever think to revisit it. You did an excellent job of anticipating many of my own questions (9:35). You also have the best motion graphics and editing I've seen for demonstrating this kind of information. I cannot thank you enough for this video!

I love the "peer review" reactions and the dialog. This is what we need. Everywhere, in science, politics etc. This is what the most powerful neurologic network looks like. Cheers ! Let's keep arguing ! Peacefully and intelligently if we can !

Electricity drama continues.

Wayyy better explanation! Thank you and bravo for helping this electrical engineer understand what you meant in the first video. Yah, I had to figure out the 1 was in meters and not unit-less. Back in my early days at Bell Labs, I was doing micro-strip lines on printed circuit boards because 500 MHz square waves on a PCB board must be handles as fields and not electrons. Thanks for what you do; the knowledge is appreciated!

Much better than the original video. The level of technical explanation is far more detailed. Feedback from the community was taken into account and an experiment was conducted to prove that the original answer was correct albeit with caveats which are also explained. One more thing that I wanted to see in the experiment is what happens when the cable is cut at both ends and compare the result for the closed circuit. With both cable ends cut the experiment should clearly demonstrate that the energy to the bulb is transferred via an electric field and not by electrons pushing each other through a wire.

Very good video. Remember there is a difference between what’s true, and what matters. Derek does a great job showing the whole truth of how circuits really work. The other videos that critique it do a great job at showing what matters. For most situations the small increase in voltage at 1/c seconds is negligible compared to the overall voltage needed to light the light bulb.

What a great time to be alive. Hundreds of years ago this discussion would be hold in books or university talks that were unavailable to the vast majority of society. Now, it is being done publically, everyone with access to internet can live this experience. It is amazing and it makes me feel like one 17th century student watching a heated physics debate.

Great explanation! I've been researching all kinds of E&M applications for longer than I care to admit, yet I still find myself taken aback all the time when a marvelously intuitive explanation like yours comes around to disabuse my common misinterpretations. So thank you for the new perspective and clarity. I'll be sure to pay it forward and better elaborate to those I've instructed to merely calculate.

Took me 2 years since this came out and about 2 months since I started tinkering with actual circuits to really understand what's going on. I knew fields had more to do with the flow of energy than electricity during my time in college by reading all the technical stuff but it's one of those things that become easy to ignore once you have built an intuition around a different model. Cool stuff, I'm glad I was finally able to come back and really understand it.