FAQs and corrections in this comment! Also: I'm starting a Patreon! patreon.com/AlphaPhoenix And a second channel! ruclips.net/channel/UC3GrRPAydgBn42lab2izBlg I'll answer some of the most common comment questions here, but in a few weeks, I'm going to post an actual post-video FAQ video on the second channel including questions from the comments here, and questions from supporters on Patreon! 1) Pre-emptive answer: The distance any given electron needs to move to "pool up" behind a resistor is miniscule, but you can't ignore it. It's tempting to say that the moment you connect a wire, electricity is a pure wave where the electrons don't move from their starting positions, but in reality they just BARELY move from their starting positions. Imagine a big long line of people, and all the people in the back of the line take one step forward - now the front of the line is crammed SLIGHTLY closer together on average - that's kinda what's going on. The scale of all of this is really weird, so demonstrations amplify it, then the demonstrations get questioned for amplifying it too much… 2) lots of people asking about inductance. In the case of the water trough model, the inertia of the flowing water is similar to inductance, and if you wanted to make the inductance larger, you could put a waterwheel with a large moment of inertia in the channel. It would be hard to spin up, and then it would be hard to spin down once you got it going. 3) lots of commenters have correctly pointed out that my “replace all the electrons” statement was too general. I am referring to all mobile electrons, which in a metal refers to one valence electron per atom. However all of these electrons, no matter where they live in the wire (in the middle or on the surface) chug along at the same drift velocity and eventually would be “replaced” if you had a way to mark them 4)
One thing that I saw in your water examples that isn't representative of electric current flows is standing waves on the surface. In a shallow water type of flow it is possible to have stationary surface standing wave patterns appear. These are unlike traditional standing waves in that the it is stationary in time. These are caused because the water flow can be close to the speed of surface wave propagation. So in some of your experiments, e.g. at 21:00 the surface is clearly not quite linear as your model would expect. These effect will not be seen in electric circuits because the electron flow velocity will always be much much slower than the wave propagation velocity.
@AlphaPhoenixChannel Okay, I think I get it. You were right to fear a fire. The demo was using nichrome wire... of I guess about 22 gauge... and about 3 feet long ... so about 3 ohms in resistance. That was to provide a length dependent voltage drop? ... and passing 1 amp of current was so as to create a voltage drop that would clearly register on your multi-mete. Anyway... that's 3 watts of power being dissipated over a very small area... so the the nichrome wire's surface temperature would start to rise quickly. Thus, it is very reasonable to fear a fire, if done near combustible materials, for an extended time. Very good video!
Ok, Another pedantic point about your example with the build up of charge in the wire as shown in 18:52. This is a great illustration, but it is misleading. The charge within the wire always redistributes to balance out forces because the charges are mobile. The potential across a wire is actually caused by extra or less charge at the *surface* of the conductor. This is because the free electrons will move until they can't move (which is at the surface interface where there is an abrupt change in conductivity). Even when there is a flow of current in the wire, it is the surface charge distribution that reaches equilibrium with the electrons bouncing around in the wire. Inside of a homogeneous conductor the distribution of charge will be uniform. This is weird because the electric field around each electron can communicate information long distances. In this case of current flow through a resistive wire, the electrons in the wire are all interacting with each other through the electric field. In this way the electrons colliding with the lattice are in equilibrium with the surface charges which are actually developing the electric field in the conductor that equilibriates to balance the effects of the "collisions" with the lattice.
As a 77 year old Amateur Radio enthusiast I am tired to the max of taking all my theory on "faith" only and not a working understanding of how it all works. Wish we had the benefit of RUclips 50 years ago. Thank you for taking the time to put this all together. God Bless...
There are some really good old books for technical stuff regarding that I got some through thriftbooks I don't have access to them at the moment but I found them by looking up lists of recommended books
Thinking about the energy of a photon E=hf, an LED with a 2V drop will emit a photon with an energy of 2eV (red). Because each photon only reacts with a single electron. The same intuition behind the photoelectric effect. From a perspective of linear electrostatic particle accelerators, it also made a lot of sense to talk about the energy of an accelerated particle as being a function of the voltage it was accelerated by and its charge. The use of eV in particle physics world is likely a holdover from those days.
I think you’re right it is probably based on accelerators. It’s super easy to express the energy you added to a particle in eV if you multiply the charge of the thing by the voltage across the plates in your gun! As particles started splitting and ending up with different masses AND energies, I think the potential necessary to slow any given particle to a stop may also have been relevant (although now don’t they look at orbit diameters in magnetic fields?) I need to know more particle physics…
@@AlphaPhoenixChannelafaik you are right. Cyclotrons and Synchrotrons make expressing electron (or proton) energies as eV VERY attractive. And since a Joule as the "default" SI unit of energy is HUGE compared to an eV it's basically useless in this regard... The only thing I can't tell you why is "why didn't physicists invent an in-between energy scale when they discovered the first signs of the charm/strange quarks at many many MeV" but maybe they were just used to eV by then and so we continue to this day saying an electron is 511keV... Edit: I just tried checking wether or not "natural units" might have something to do with holding onto the eV, but couldn't find my old lecture notes. So it might be a good starting point to look into c = h_bar = e = 1 which makes basically all physical units be eV as to why we still use it instead of some other slightly better positioned unit
yes, they flat out lie to use to try to 'make it easier ' to understand. Where a clear simple explanation could deliver the principals easily. Its like saying to someone: "its just because"
I’m a professional electrical engineer with 30 years of experience and an adjunct physics teacher. I am Old. I think this is probably the best examples I have seen for examples of voltage and current flow. Excellent job and my hat is off to you.
@@CharlieTheAstronautyou probably did. Everyone equates a degree with understanding when in reality all it meant was that you could pass tests :P Some of the most amazing teachers I’ve seen have been on RUclips. I just wish they’d get their act together and make a RUclips university.
@@stevrgrs Absolutely true. Those were four mostly wasted years of my life. We had two excellent teachers who were experts in their fields, and the rest were just people who could not get a job in the field, so they started teaching.
@@CharlieTheAstronautyeah I’m 43 and had a mentor that I learned everything from but back then society trashed everyone that didn’t have a degree or was a tradesman. I would tell people I wasn’t in school and they would look at me like I was a heroin addict. Now I’m the one with the student loans and the tradesmen are retired and spend their days fishing and doing whatever they want 😂 I’m so glad my son will grow up with all this awesome information ! I found this video whilst trying to find someone that could explain electricity like I do so my seven year old doesn’t have to listen to me all the time :P
I have an engineering degree and I never quite understood electric flow until I stumbled upon on this gem of a presentation and I am pushing 50. Never too old to learn. Top notch.
You're able to convey information in a way that people don't just hear what you're saying but they understand it. You use technical terms when appropriate and you also break down their meanings and give insight into what things really mean instead of leaving it behind a technically accepted definition of the word. The point is, being able to teach things effectively and in a way that the majority understand is not a common trait. I hope you continue to make more content and keep exercising this ability. Good teachers are hard to find.
Thank you for your kind words! I truly believe that effective teaching is a rare skill, and it's great to hear that the RUclipsr was able to convey complex information in an understandable way. As someone who values quality family time and outdoor adventures, I also appreciate products like the Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series. Its massive capacity, fast recharging, and versatile sockets make it a reliable power backup solution for camping trips and ensuring uninterrupted family time. Keep up the good work, RUclipsr!
This has by far the best explanation of voltage I have ever encountered. I am 46 and not without an education but I have never succeeded in digesting any part of the theory of electricity and I have repeatedly sought out learning materials to engage with this over the last 20+ years and never, ever felt satisfied that I had gotten beyond reciting Ohm's law. Up until about twenty minutes ago, I coud honestly say that I had no more understanding of electricity than whatever it is that comes out the end of a wizard's wand in the Harry Potter universe. The various ways of comparing 'water systems' with 'electron systems' only made the matter worse...until now. The literal demonstration with water and 'dams/resistors' is absolutely bloody amazing, breathtaking actually, and ridiculously obvious once you see it in the flesh, so to speak. Many, many thanks Brian. Absolutely excellent presentation!
It’s like having a reservoir the size of the oceans and adding a cup of water at one side and having a cup spill out the other side thousands of kilometres away. The individual water molecules don’t move very far or fast, but it’s the influence that each molecule has on the next, ie a wave, is what is carrying the electric potential effect on the other side. This is a bit of an epiphany for me. Thank you, Brian. 🥲
I’m glad! You’re welcome! I love this phrasing - that’s a great mental image. Still off by many orders of magnitude, but much more tangibly similar to the truth than the few-inch deep channel
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel so, a field perturbation of some kind? P.S. I’ve always had trouble conceptualizing many of the fundamentals of electricity. Your video is breaking down those walls. Thank you!
I cannot tell you how thankful I am for this. I always struggle when I can’t see ‘how’ and ‘why’ things work, and I had this issue in school where we learned to memorize things but were never explained why. It’s only as an adult that I’m relearning things for fun that i never fully grasped while supposed to be learning it
Wow, same for me. I've learned hundreds of times more, as an adult via videos like this, than I did at school. I just love knowledge now and didn't care much for it at younger ages
As an EE dropout that became a hobbyist and still loves this stuff... This video is fantastic! I'm gonna use it to explain the concepts to others. It's so intuitive!
Im a substation engineer for a utility company. Some new people we hire struggle to understand basic principles of electricity. In looking for a video to give a good visual understanding I found this. Best metaphors I have ever seen. Not only did I find a better way to imagine electricity, I can also show people this to help them. Damn.. insane to think this you can get college level knowledge for free on RUclips. Hats off to you man. God bless🍻
It can be confusing. Some people think a 12V battery with 800 cranking amps can kill, if you touch both poles, because of the high current. But because skin has a high resistance, there is barely flowing any current if you touch both poles of a 12V battery. Higher voltage on the other hand, forces more current through skin, but it's not the current we should worry about. Example: Worst case you need about 1000000V before 800A can flow through skin (but it's not relevant!). In short, it's the voltage that's dangerous. Touching anything under 48V is unlikely to kill anyone. But 110V for example, can surely kill you! Edit: Some clarifications.
@@BrainHurricanesyou actually don’t have the concepts right. The battery supplies a voltage that is given by the electrochemical reaction used in the battery. It defines the potential difference (voltage) between the poles. There is no current associated with a battery. The current that will flow is given by Ohm’s law when a load is connected. That’s what you almost had right by referring to the resistance of a person’s body (“skin”); whatever the load R is, the current (I) will be given by I = V/R. V is fixed by the battery, but I depends on R. “Cranking amps” of a car battery, which you mentioned in your comment as if it were relevant, is only specifying the capacity of the battery (how large it is or more technically the capacity of the chemicals inside), which relates to how much current it can supply (quickly) for starting your car once the circuit is closed with a fairly low resistance of your starter. It doesn’t tell you anything about actual current that is somehow “supplies.” BTW- You can get quite injured by much less than 1 million volts, as you claim. Ask anyone who has accidentally grabbed two ends of 110V with their two hands. Current flowing across arms can stop a human heart almost instantly. I just want to make sure nobody reads your comment and thinks anything less than 1 millions volts is safe.
Thank you for being intelligent enough to teach without answering questions with an equation. Equations arent answers, they’re just tools that explain absolutely nothing about how or why. Thank you sir.
The equation is not reality, rather an understanding of it. This illustration is rather a way to explain it, however absolute nanoscale precision it is not.
Absolutely agree, physics has the qualitative aspects that is essentialy to explain and understand the phenoms. It's not a bunch of equations to memorise
As a lifelong High Voltage Electrician I can tell all that this is absolutely the best presentation of what I've been telling folks my whole life. Great job! As I grew & developed my family and housing, my children learned physics beyond their years. Water + movement - Electricity = Work-Power
I love that! I hope to teach my children likewise someday. Understanding the basic physics of things is so satisfying when you can look at an object and think "I bet I could reverse engineer that." lol
The water model breaks down when you understand the transmission lines .. it's a terrible tool and that sets up the mind set that electrons push each other in a circuit and they don't.
@@Dazza_Doo Terrible is an exaggeration. AlphaPhoenix's demonstration even shows how water acts like a wave channeled through a waveguide. Opening the switch initiates a wavefront that travels along the channel until reaching a barrier with a new impedance, at which point it can partially reflect and partially transmit. The only thing unique to a transmission line is the electric field is a 3D vector field rather than the 1D scalar field of the water level, so you have added complexity with TE and TM propagation modes. But the root of wave propagation is the same for both water and electricity. This a great tool for getting young minds to make analogies between things they can easily see and things that are basically invisible. Don't discredit simplicity just because it's not flawlessly accurate. Insisting on telling everyone how complex physics is dissuades many from ever attempting to pursue it. It's disheartening because, sure, some of the math is complicated and a grind to get through, but most of the physical concepts are very intuitive.
@cwithham69 Did you know there is an alternative cosmological theory called the Electric Universe? The Thunderbolts Project and more recently Breaking the Science Barrier are Electric Universe yt channels.
@@Dazza_Dooelectrons do, in fact, push one another. Why else would there be any potential difference in a transmission line caused by a generator. Think of that for a second. The generator excites electrons near it. This excitation spreads through the electric field causing each electron to interact with its adjacent counterparts. However, this reaction isn’t instantaneous - as electrons have mass and absorb energy; therefore, the traveling wave in a transmission line is a product of a the ‘speed limit’ of the electric field. Furthermore, since electrons all possess the same charge characteristics, the fields all interact similar to a fluid. This interaction is repulsive in nature. The water model is not a great model - nonetheless. The gravity model is the best, but there is no parallel to negative charges for gravity, as antimatter’s existence is in question. The gravity model is similar because of gravitational fields and every objects linear contribution to the total given gravitational field at any point.
Not only was this explained so well, it's engaging! It's one of those rare moments when you start watching something educational and you don't want to stop because you don't feel like you're being taught a lesson, this is learning. If education would stop focusing on learning how to solve equations but rather how to apply an equation as a solution to a problem. People would be more success remembering or becoming interested.
My hat is off to you AlphaPhoenix because you've succeeded at completing a task that I've been trying (and failing) to do for over 40 years : i.e., Fully explaining Ohm's law and making it understandable to a layperson with no prerequisite EE knowledge in under one hour. You're the teaching hero my family needed! Many thanks to you for taking the time to make the video :)
I teach electricity and showed this to my students. About 30% of them understood it. The rest of them got lost about 10 minutes in. Think understanding electricity takes time and effort. Most people don’t understand it because they don’t want to put in the energy to learn it.
Learn the proper way. Rick Hartley on twisted wire pairs, transmission lines. Electrons don't push each other. The power from your home doesn't share electrons from the power station.
@@dougfoster445Indeed that is always the case with understanding unfamiliar things most people just never go any further if it doesn't come to them intuitively. understanding is all about linking and making sense of facts you are given, and that rarely happens without struggle and time(the more unfamiliar the harder the struggle) edit: should say " given information "rather than " facts" for some ... reasons
Haha yeah then it’s even weirder because you can use ohms law on an instant-by-instant basis to analyze real current, or you abstract an alternating current into imaginary numbers and somehow those still play nice and linearly with abstracted impedances. It’s amazing how many bizarre systems (even within electricity) can boil down to “thing is proportional to other thing” 😂
Don’t forget Euler’s formula, and the fact that such a thing is possible only because those circuits are linear time-invariant and only sinusoidal inputs are allowed and steady-state is assumed. It’s not just thanks to “Ohm’s law”.
This is my favorite video on youtube. For YEARS I have tried to imagine how electricity actually works (using analogies). After a lot of headache, this just confirms what I was thinking AND taught me why the wire connecting to the terminals of a heating element don't also heat up (a question I've been having for a while now). Simply the best researched.
Ok, I’ve two things to say here. 1) Very good job outlining the intuitive approach to learning about electricity and how it works. I literally become a bit smarter (about this) after watching your video. 2) Your enthusiasm helped me want to learn more because it’s how I teach (automotive and criminology). So many presenters on this site merely go over formulas and surface-level material so dryly that I wonder if they’re even interested in their own lectures or explanations. The water table made things so much more understandable because I struggled with the notion of ‘potential’ regarding voltage and the water analogy made so much more sense. Thank you!
So true, if the teacher is bored students can tell, they immediately think well if he’s not interested why should I be? The problem is if you ARE interested and desperately want to learn, it can be incredibly frustrating. I’d rather have an average teacher who cares, than some know-all who’d rather be doing something else.
This video goes right into my playlist "The best videos of the entire RUclips". So many questions that I've been wondering over from day to day at my job as an electician is awesomely explained.
I'm an electrical engineer and had till recently a very clear idea of "how electricity worked". Heck, I even wired all the electricity in my home. My understanding all started to shatter when Veritassium started talking about the Poynting vector 2 years -ish ago and *you* dear AlphaPhoenix did a follow-up video which I loved. So I'm more confused about the theory that explains why I can build such electronic marvels in the real world with no sweat 🙂 I guess that's the difference between a PhD and a Masters degree... Congrats on sustaining your thesis by the way. Never too late to celebrate.
i am unaware of this theory - " the theory that explains why I can build such electronic marvels in the real world with no sweat", this no sweat building theory, what is it called?
Software and math guy here...dabbling in electronics. This is hands down the best, most illustrative and intuitive explanation I've encountered. The visual representations you chose really upset my current mental model and set it correct. Thanks so much. This is fantastic!
Have struggled with the water model for years due to lack integration of particle physics and too much anthropomorphic metaphors. This has helped a ton. Thank you for working so hard on the visuals.
I don't know what sort of introduction you had, but water analogies are absolutely where electricity should be begin. They just need to be given with the caveat that water molecules don't push on each other at a distance, they have to bump into each other (at room temperatures) and water molecules don't have another field where changes in one field affects the other. So electricity will travel through a wire faster than water in a pipe because elections will push on each other despite large gaps between them, and water won't have things like inductors. But pressure is a high level thing, and at the level of pressure they are very similar. If you were transmitting power long range with pressured water in a pipe, would you want to use low PSI and require the water to fly through the pipe at super high speed, or a high PSI and let the water move slowly through the pipe while delivering the same power? Anyone who has ever blown water through a straw will know it doesn't like to move at high speed through the straw. Its why long range power lines are 200,000V and up. You might be able to plug a low PSI pipe with your finger even if the pipe has a 1 mile diameter and turns a generator that could vaporize you. A 12V submarine battery wont do anything to you if you put your hand across the terminals but it will vaporize a fork across the terminals. Low pressure but a potential Niagara Falls of volume. There are good analogies between "ground" and the ocean also.
Voltage, Potential Difference -> Voltage is the difference between the 2 ends. It's the level of attraction the electrons feel to move from one place to another. A battery is 1.5 volts, this means there's a 1.5 difference between the 2 ends. A home circuit of 120 volts means there's a 120 difference. 240 volts means there's a 240 difference. As the Volts increase, the level of attraction also increases, so the electrons try way harder to get to the other side. That's how i understand and visualise it. HTH.
In a way Franklin did us a favor by getting the sign convention "wrong". He taught us that we have to be more flexible in our understanding of what "current" really is, and that it isn't necessarily electron flow, and also isn't necessarily in the direction charges are flowing. Had he gotten his sign convention "right", we'd learn from day 1, that current is the flow of electrons, and most people would complacently stay in the dark about other possibilities.
Glad to know someone of your big brain understanding also struggled a lot with this concept. Although I'm familiar with the analogies you presented, I must say the way you presented them has cemented them a lot better - I do feel upgraded to having a VAGUEly decent understanding now.
Thank you for sharing this knowledge. This is something I’ve been trying to understand for 20 years. Working with electricity and diagnosing failed electrical systems as an automotive technician. Now I have a much clearer understanding of what is happening inside the circuits.
My guess for the nanosecond scale voltage-wire slice-time graph is - based on your previous videos - you might have used your oscilloscope to measure at a certain point on the wire and the input, moved the probe to another point, repeated the experiment, exported these snapshots and used some python wizardy to match them up and transform them (time vs voltage at a specific point on wire) to get the 3D graph (point on wire vs voltage vs time). Also, I think this is the best explanation and visual experiment for getting a grasp of these concepts, while also keeping it focused but still telling the small print later on, it should be played in schools. Thanks!
As always, no matter how much you know about a subject this channel always finds a different way to make you visualize the concepts!!! I love your work man, it’s of extremely high quality! That model you used to describe the random movement of electrons is AMAZING.
Other videos "taught" electricity is not the actual flow of an electron from one end of a wire to the other, but more like electrons bumping its neighbor and causing the transfer of energy. As you said an electron moves very slowly vs the effect which occurs at nearly the speed of light. And that devices such as wireless chargers and transformers where there is no direct connection for electron flow. The more I seek to learn the more confused I become!
I have never studied and hardly understand anything about mathematics in this field. But I want to thank you that even I am able to understand these things through your visual experiments, at least superficially. I wish I had had a teacher like you earlier. Probably then I had studied before :) Thank you very much for this!
Well you are studying right now. I think the hardest part about learning/studying is to find the right starting level. If there is something the teacher assumes that you know, but you don't, it can make it really difficult to realise that assumption by yourself, and it can make learning really hard. On the other hand if the teacher assumes you do not already know a lot of things, that can make learning very boring. If you are one on one with a teacher you trust, you can tell them that there is something you do not understand, or that you do understand the part they are descripting thereby you can move along. But on the other hand, if you have a book/video you can go back if you find something that you thought was less important but turned out to be very important, you can take a brake when you get tired, you can jump ahead if you are bored and other things that can be harder to do with a teacher. But there is no doubt that a good inspiring teacher can change your life and send you down a path that you would never have ended up on without that teacher. Understanding something start with understanding it superficial and don't let math hold you back. If math seems hard it i probably just because your are missing some peach of the puzzle (an assumption) or do not understand the syntax. Practice notering when there is a key peace if information holding you back, and how to find that peach. Do not let anyone, not even your self hold you back if there is something you would like to understand, and over timer you will see how many pieces of the puzzle that are reuse again and again and often you can get a good 20% understanding of something new without that much work. But also know that you will never be able to learn everything about anything, and that the more you learn the more you will know that you do not know. Learning can be very humbling, and most of the time we are only learning half truths, the har part it to know when a half truth is useful and when it is not. Keep it up.
I’ve been an electrician for 28 years, got an electrical engineering degree 4 years ago, work with electronics DAILY… this 39 minute video made EVERYTHING come together! Hopefully I don’t let this knowledge “equilibrate” and I can move forward. This video is SO awesome and my friend you are BRILLIANT in how you simply explained it. Thanks.
Current flows between two points when there is a difference of voltage (and hence, potential) between them. An analogy I like is that of the difference of temperature between two masses, which results in the flow of heat energy between them when a conductive path is present.
Thanks SO MUCH for these kind of explanations! My head always did this in school and still does, I was terribly slow in doing homework because I couldn't learn formulae just like that, I had to understand them to reconstruct them at a test. haha But, though schools don't work like that, I think that's way better... understanding something makes learning easier instead of cramming formulae in your head.
I teach HS physics. This was one of the best explanations I’ve seen about the various electrical terms. Thank you! This is going to be a new video that I’ll have my students watch.
Ok. I mean if your teaching it , you must imply to your students only for a reference to understanding, I also use examples to try explaining to folks in the 12volt community but , technically it's not right. Current doesn't flow through the conducter, it spirals around the outside of the conducter "wire" , nothing flows inside. So with implied examples, it kinda steers u in the wrong compression but it does help to understand resistance but then again that's not what's actually occurring.
As an aspiring HAM technician, I can honestly say that this is one of the most educating and fun to watch explanations of Ohm's Law... Kudos!! A subscription well deserved!! Greetings from Athens, Greece
Dude you are a godsend, you literally explained how electricity works better than any teacher or any learning material I've ever tried to learn from. Good stuff, thank you.
As a layman, I loved this video - it really does provide a level of intuition that I didn't get from previous explanations/analogies. One thing not addressed is why, when there's no resistor in the circuit, the voltage drops linearly along the wire. If I had to guess, it's because the wire itself is actually infinitely many small uniform resistors in series, with infinitely many small sections where the water level is "flat". Kind of like how calculus derivatives are explained - from discrete segments of dy/dx to a smooth tangent curve (as dx approaches 0). And why does the linear drop go away when a resistor is added? Because the resistance of (any section of) the wire is now insignificant, compared to the resistance of the proper resistor. So each of the two "flat" pools of water on either side of the resistor is actually a linear drop, but with such a small height difference so as to appear flat.
Correct. When he showed the smooth drop in voltage over the wire vs. the step when the resistor was added, he did both tests at 1 volt, which means much less current was flowing when the resistor was added. In the water trough analogy, say that when he showed the smooth gradient with no stoppers it dropped 2 cm. To make that drop, he was flowing a large amount of water and it was flowing very fast and at a uniform speed across the length of the trough. When a stopper was added, if he wanted it to still drop 2 cm over the entire distance, he had to pump much less water through the trough because it is now flowing the distance much slower on average. It is moving very slow on its way towards the stopper, so it has time to come closer to equilibrium before it reaches the stopper. It then goes past the stopper very quickly as it loses all of its "voltage" in a short distance, then moves slowly again to the exit so it comes close to equilibrium on the other side. More stoppers means the water moves slower on average and he needs less of it. This is a constant voltage power supply. On the other hand, if he wants to keep the amount of water the same and puts in a stopper anyway, the height that the water falls at the step down of the stopper will be much higher than the original height that it dropped across the distance with no stoppers. It will still be slower than before on either side of the stopper so it will form a step, but will move much faster in the short distance passing the stopper, which will keep the average speed/amount of the water the same as it was with no resistance/stoppers. This is a constant current power supply. Summary: For any given voltage (overall drop in height of the water over the distance of the trough), adding a resistor (stopper) will make the current drop (require less/slower moving water) and the voltage will therefore have more time to equalize on either side of the resistor. You can actually see as he moves the stoppers up (decreasing the resistance) that the water on either side starts to slope more and when he moves it down (increases resistance), it becomes more and more of a defined step. It is not the presence of just any resistor that makes the step; as the resistance value goes to 0, the voltage (water level) on either side will start to angle more and more and the curve will approach that of the original curve with no resistor. As the resistance gets higher, the curve will become more of a definitive step with the voltage on either side being more and more flat.
@@phillipthompson2347 hey in your first paragraph, why does water move slower when going towards the stopper? And why can you use the water analogy more when you said that water loses energy after it passes the stopper? And that it moves faster there.. I would really appreciate you if ya help me understand. By the way, what’s the relation of water molecules speed and curvature as it drops down across the distance
As a high school electronics major, they never really taught us to think of electricity that way, mostly how to calculate things and that has been bugging me since I've started learning electronics. This video is awesome! Love all the analogies and various explanations. It feels like I actually have a grip on those supposed-to-be basic concepts now.
Just read the textbook ffs. It literally explains all this stuff, in better detail and with far more information density. You should be reading the chapter before you go to lecture, and never take notes, since it just distracts and wastes your time. This is coming from someone who got a 3.98 GPA doing a physics major at UC Berkeley (I got 2 A-'s).
I don't know what sort of introduction you had, but water analogies are absolutely where electricity should be begin. They just need to be given with the caveat that water molecules don't push on each other at a distance, they have to bump into each other (at room temperatures) and water molecules don't have another field where changes in one field affects the other. So electricity will travel through a wire faster than water in a pipe because elections will push on each other despite large gaps between them, and water won't have things like inductors. But pressure is a high level thing, and at the level of pressure they are very similar. If you were transmitting power long range with pressured water in a pipe, would you want to use low PSI and require the water to fly through the pipe at super high speed, or a high PSI and let the water move slowly through the pipe while delivering the same power? Anyone who has ever blown water through a straw will know it doesn't like to move at high speed through the straw. Its why long range power lines are 200,000V and up. You might be able to plug a low PSI pipe with your finger even if the pipe has a 1 mile diameter and turns a generator that could vaporize you. A 12V submarine battery wont do anything to you if you put your hand across the terminals but it will vaporize a fork across the terminals. Low pressure but a potential Niagara Falls of volume. There are good analogies between "ground" and the ocean also.
I only just started this video but I can tell that this is exactly what I needed. The craziest part to me is that yesterday I was telling somebody that I always wanted to learn how electricity works and today this video is the first thing that pops up. Thank you Siri for listening to me and my private conversations.
8:49 "Voltage is weird." I don't know how many videos/things I've read to try and understand voltage and you're the first to put it in these terms. Thank you. Great explanations.
I did have a bit of a chuckle at seeing the vacuum permittivity constant described as "some useless constant" I had also assumed that your electricity waves we're going to be based on solving Maxwell's Equations... Now I'm really looking forward to seeing how you went about actually measuring that!
The analogy of playing with waves on a very deep ocean and the size needed of the trough to represent a 1 volt drop just blew my mind and makes an infinite amount of sense to me.
It really demonstrates how powerful the electric force is, that even such a small, imperceptible change in the total can have such a remarkable effect in things like railguns and high explosives. Imagine if you could access the depths of that abyss.
Every time I start to think "Hmm, quite a bit of time since the last AlphaPhoenix upload" it only takes a few days and I see a new video from you! May be I should think about that more often :D
Your enthusiasm is just so. Friggen. Captivating. It's like the knowledge connects to my brain, making me understand your enthusiasm, which makes the connection stronger and repeats until the "path of least resistance" is cleared and it all just flows so smoothly. I'm excited as HELL for the next one!
Hands down the BEST and most complete video I have seen on OHMs law, I love your examples, the infrared cameras and analogies used! If my school would have had a teacher like you 35 years ago I might have become an electrician :). Thanks for creating this content!
The live graph at 30:49 might be the coolest representation in electronics that I've seen. What a great thing to show at the end of the explanation. That super worked for me! ❤
This is one of the best f*cking videos on RUclips I’ve ever watched. Fellow electrician here, (“slightly” ***biased***) moving into the renewable and industrial sector, and you synthesized numerous analogies of electrons for me into concepts and comparisons that are right up my brain’s alley. I wish my subscription paid you, because you’ve earned a lifetime subscription from me. Cheers to you dawg. You’re the real deal and the definition of the Good the internet is meant to be for mankind!
I am a 83 year old electronic hobby student playing at it during the 1960's. Getting married and making a living in Architecture I have been retired for some time got involved with radio control systems for model aircraft and now trying to catch up with the micro chip age to keep my brain alive. Thank you for the video .
The key new intuition I actually gained from this was understanding why and how resistors convert electrical energy to heat, rather than simply understanding that they do
Seems pretty obvious it is due to collisions; this is stuff you can easily deduce as a 13 year old by just knowing that things are made of atoms and particles
I have to believe this video will benefit many many people and could make a definite difference in people’s potential career choices. Massive thanks Nd kudos. Finally I can start to much better why the wheels turn on my electric car 😆👍
"Playing with waves on top of a very deep ocean" is a good analogy, Also explains a bit about how static electricity can achieve such high voltages under certain circumstances. Love the work.
I agree Im 72 and dropped my first electronics class in Jr college because the teacher was former Stanford instructor and required his own book for his class. The first chapter I was totally lost he was talking hole theory chemistry and moles, Physics and electron valences. I just wanted to be a technician not a physics buff. It was like Taking us skiing down a Black Diamond hill. Before we knew how to snowplow. This video helped a lot But I'll have to watch a few more times. I dont get how electrons move from atom to atom at the speed of light. There has to be some minute fraction of a second where the atom changes from what it was. interesting that Voltage can make atoms and electrons more pressure and volume. Higher potential to flow. But what of high voltage low amps. I'll watch again :)
This is the first video I've seen about electricity where someone actually explains what electricity is, how it acts, and why it acts that way. Many other videos only explain what electricity is, and how it acts, not why it acts that way. Every other video has left me with the question "but why", except this one. Thank you!
@@Dimitrij088 Electricity itself is created using principles we don't fully understand. Unless you can explain how magnetism works or why specifically its effects are able to generate electricity. Until then we're stuck using "magic" and thinking we know it all.
This is amazing, thank you so much, I've slowly been teaching myself this after decades of being interested in electronics, and only recently have I really started to understand what's going on. This really cleared things up in my mind. It'd be awesome if you followed on with the "Holes" and went into semiconductors. While I kinda understand how transistors work, it'd be nice to have some of your smart analogies to explain it better, especially with things like mosfets which still confuse me quite a bit.
Semi conductors are dielectric materials (like silicon) doped with conductors p or n (phosphorus, gallium etc..) when a threshold of current is met the gate/drain switches open and supposedly the electrons "skip" across "holes" (i don't believe in electrons) but I won't confuse you on that point. The easiest way to think about it is that it is intermediate composite material between insulators and conductors placed between conductives like a little draw bridges that opens for current switch junctions or flow direction when electrostatic conditions are met.
If they “don’t believe in electrons”, don’t let them confuse YOU…😂 In semiconductors, as in metals, most of the electrons are locked in place because they are used in bonding. The difference is in metals, electrons can start moving down a wire if they gain just a TINY bit of energy - energy they can get just by the material being warm. In semiconductors, any given electron would need to gain a LOT of energy before it could start to flow, so the vast majority of them don’t - they’re stuck. You can insert trace impurities of other atoms called dopants that basically add electrons that already have a bit more energy, that way again they only need a little bit to start moving like in a metal. By fiddling with the concentration of these dopants, and by applying electric fields across the entire material, you can create a device that sometimes has no mobile electrons so it’s an insulator, and sometimes has many mobile electrons and acts like a conductor. All insulators could really be referred to as “high bandgap semiconductors”. There are even people trying to make electronics out of diamond, which is an extreme insulator.
For anyone wanting a great introduction to Ohm's Law, or electricityin general, WATCH THIS. I'm a math, physics, and astronony professor for the last quarter century, although my degrees are in engineering (civil/structural). Just want to say, in all the ways and levels of teaching E&M (tech students to EE majors, i.e., simple algebra to calc based), these analogies are beautiful, and your explanations perfect. Voltage is abstract, it takes a while to really get a feel for "electric potential energy per unit charge." For physics students, there's great ways to build on this from Mechanics. However, the water analogy I find to be the most useful. The visualization and tangibility is immediately accessible. Now, remember, when caulking, you need to follow the 3 contact surface rule! Lol
Voltage is how fast the river is flowing, amps are how many ducks are in the water(ducks hurt) and resistance is a log sticking out into the river or a boulder in the river.
You’re an amazing teacher. Love the way you explain and show all this. Most teachers can’t teach to make the information stick and make it fun. You can! Thank you!
This is AMAZING! I've been searching for YEARS looking for an intuitive explanation for voltage and Ohm's law and why it works the way it does. The water pressure thing never really quite made sense to me (since I felt like it broke down when you thought about it hard enough), but comparing voltage to water *height* instead of *pressure* suddenly made everything work. I love that explanation! This was a fantastic video to watch.
This came up on my feed. You perked my interest when I saw the texbook in your hand - Horowitz and Hill, The Art of Electronics. Thank you so much for taking their analogies, and making them colorful and 3 dimensional. This is true learning, and the sign of a gifted teacher.
Haven’t yet finished watching (as it takes me a couple of rewatches per concept), but it’s already clear to me that you’ve made brilliant job understanding it yourself and explaining it to us. I was searching for this “deep intuition” for a very long time and now I’ll stick here for a while. Sincere gratitude and respect, sir. Please, keep making these videos
incredible video thank you, i find this water channel model quite a lot more intuitive than the usual water in a pipe model we get shown in schools. this plus your "Path of Least Resistance" video have really furthered my understanding of electricity
I think i get your analogies for voltage, or potential difference, but there are some parts for voltage i dont get. Like, a 9 volt battery would produce 9 volts worth of potential difference between the two sides of the resistor, and that 9 volts is basically electrons denser on one side and less dense on the other. If thats the case, then wouldnt current be different for the 2 parts of the curcuit? Current is amount of moving electrons passing through a point per unit time, but if the electrons are less dense, as in less compact, on one side of the circuit, the current wouldnt be the same everywhere, right? And from my physics classes, i remember clearly that current must be the same everywhere. So im probably missing something, could someone explain it for me? (1. Im talking about a basic series circuit. 2. When i say electrons are "less dense", i mean like less electrons per unit area, opposite with "more dense")
It’s very similar to water being “incompressible”. From the perspective of pressure, and pressure causing water to flow, of course water is compressible, but the actual change in volume with pressure is so minuscule that it doesn’t matter when you are calculating stuff like flow rates. Technically the electrons in one part of the wire are going faster to produce the same current but it’s SO slight you could never measure it. The water “channel” model doesn’t handle it very well because unlike a pipe, the water channel changes in volume a lot!
This has to be THE BEST explanation of how ohm's law works that I've ever seen. I generally have trouble understanding abstract concepts. So to see it in physical form and explained this way was awesome!! Thank you so much!! I am now excited about electricity again and it's applications! I've had basic electronics 101 training back in the 1990's and have used it on my job as a Multi-craft Technician. But my understanding of the concepts were, this is how it works and that's it! I am a person that needs to know why, things work the way they do to fully understand it! This teaching accomplishes that!
The funny thing is that I've played with electronics more than plumbing, so the water analogy tends to only help me understand how plumbing works more instead lol
@@ksrele A valve will act like a variable resistor. If pressure is fixed you regulate flow, if the flow is fixed you regulate pressure. In order to construct a regulator you would need to incorporate some reference as a setpoint and some sort of measurement for feedback.
First misunderstanding: As newtons' apple had positive potential energy, it was assumed that electrons did too. (having "negative" potential was the "flaw", as Ben Franklin theorized... kinda-sorta a vacuum) A graphic of electron movement at the atomic level may be helpful, possibly including to indicate why conductors conduct (i.e "shells"); As for general electron "flow" direction (i.e. cumulative electron repulsion), that depends on the relative positions (vs. nucleus) of the orbiting electrons, from atom to atom. To wit: a negatively charged electron only has potential when between an electro-magnetic field of force, has a difference of 1 volt. think of ping-pong balls in front of/behind a fan, direction limited between two walls. It's not the "speed" of the electrons, but the cumulative quantity of electrons, in a particular direction. Think: bowling pins.
Holy cow, that was in INTENSLY good video. As an engineer, I watch a lot of these type videos and this one REALLY stood out. I am so much smarter for having watched this , I cant thank you enough. Just really really good stuff.
This is why you are one of the best content creators out there. You have a talent for explaining complex phenomena in ways that can be easily understood.
I've been learning and teaching this topic for a long time, and always thoughts there must be a more intuitive/ accurate way of thinking about it than the traditional pipes and pump model. I've searched long and hard, never finding anything, so for me this video is genuinely wonderful.
I have been watching videos that explain this-most of them are much shorter-and this video is, at least for me, easily the best and most understandable. This topic and these concepts require time to digest and i really appreciate the fact that you took the time to explain them. You are a very good teacher.
Voltage is a force Current is charge Apply voltage through wire You can move Current through wire You just move the electrons on a wire Power is combined Force x Current You just got a work Power is Work Power will not exist without applying a force To a Charge Until you apply a Force and the Current will travel And it is call Power = Work that's it
The real interesting thing that happens with that model is when R -> 0 but only from the intensity point of view, and it explains why high school Engineers and Scientists to be burn up so many power sources in the electronics lab. Thank god for fuses right? Anyways I do remember the day (during middle school) when the concept finally clicked for me, and it was in fact water: height of the waterfall analog to Voltage; amount of water analog to Amperage... Anyways it would have not happen hadn't my Granpa taken me on so many camping to river sights, and my fair share of bumping against river rocks, so like Indiana Jones once said: Get out of the library! Thank you for such cool videos, they are delight!
I think it's really fun to imagine the electron-as-hill-of-potential. So you have your electron, and you have to push it up a hill to get it close to the other electron. But the electron itself is a hill, so you end up pushing a hill up another hill, which is hilarious to me.
That actually is the missing intuition I needed to understand why the energy is stored in the electric field, thank you so much!!! Also, I agree that it’s very funny lol.
God I love this channel. You present things at a level that is neither condescending nor too technical. There are so many super intro level videos out there and then super advanced level shit and nothing in between. You bring advanced insight to these concepts I "knew" but never understood this intuitively! Keep it up man!
Wow, that way very informative and you explain things well. 30+ years in power generation, but most electronics I dealt with were "plug and play." I had to retire early for health reasons so I decided this would be a great hobby because I could do w/o a lot of moving around. At 60, my ability to learn new things isn't quite as sharp as it was years ago. Your video made it so easy to follow along. You are a bright young man and I'm going to watch more of your videos right now. Subbed and bell on! Thanks for helping folks like myself!
Thank you. I always thought of Voltage as electrical pressure, like in a pneumatic system, and batteries like balloons for electricity. That's what it felt like riding an e-bike without a boost converter to maintain the exact voltage. Motor is the most lively with a fully charged battery. But would act so tired as the battery depleted, like an almost empty balloon pushing less & less. This would be more noticeable with the linear voltage drop of capacitors, since bstteries have a nominal voltage they vaguely sit at, making their discharge curve look like an A instead of a straight line. And like a balloon with sticky insides. A battery pops if you overfill it. And us also damaged if you let it deflate too much. And also damaged by constantly going from full to empty, instead of keeping it in a smaller inflation range in the middle. Like between 20 and 80%. Batteries are less stressed out, staying around 50%. Right analogy?
I loved this video. I studied electronics back in 1989 - 1992 and my electronics instructor, though he would use the water analogy at times, would always say that we should not depend on it for our internal understanding of electron flow because he said it was only a loose parallel to the reality and not descriptively accurate ... And here you are making a strong case for it being very accurate. Whatever the truth ... you have taught me a much better understanding of voltage than I ever had before. And for that, I thank you!
Thanks for your time to put together an amazing video. This is better explanation that what 99% (or likely 100%) of EE students get in their college courses and you passion to teach is impressive.
FAQs and corrections in this comment!
Also: I'm starting a Patreon! patreon.com/AlphaPhoenix
And a second channel! ruclips.net/channel/UC3GrRPAydgBn42lab2izBlg
I'll answer some of the most common comment questions here, but in a few weeks, I'm going to post an actual post-video FAQ video on the second channel including questions from the comments here, and questions from supporters on Patreon!
1) Pre-emptive answer: The distance any given electron needs to move to "pool up" behind a resistor is miniscule, but you can't ignore it. It's tempting to say that the moment you connect a wire, electricity is a pure wave where the electrons don't move from their starting positions, but in reality they just BARELY move from their starting positions. Imagine a big long line of people, and all the people in the back of the line take one step forward - now the front of the line is crammed SLIGHTLY closer together on average - that's kinda what's going on. The scale of all of this is really weird, so demonstrations amplify it, then the demonstrations get questioned for amplifying it too much…
2) lots of people asking about inductance. In the case of the water trough model, the inertia of the flowing water is similar to inductance, and if you wanted to make the inductance larger, you could put a waterwheel with a large moment of inertia in the channel. It would be hard to spin up, and then it would be hard to spin down once you got it going.
3) lots of commenters have correctly pointed out that my “replace all the electrons” statement was too general. I am referring to all mobile electrons, which in a metal refers to one valence electron per atom. However all of these electrons, no matter where they live in the wire (in the middle or on the surface) chug along at the same drift velocity and eventually would be “replaced” if you had a way to mark them
4)
Are you doing well?
One thing that I saw in your water examples that isn't representative of electric current flows is standing waves on the surface. In a shallow water type of flow it is possible to have stationary surface standing wave patterns appear. These are unlike traditional standing waves in that the it is stationary in time. These are caused because the water flow can be close to the speed of surface wave propagation. So in some of your experiments, e.g. at 21:00 the surface is clearly not quite linear as your model would expect. These effect will not be seen in electric circuits because the electron flow velocity will always be much much slower than the wave propagation velocity.
don't leave us hanging on 4!
@AlphaPhoenixChannel Okay, I think I get it. You were right to fear a fire. The demo was using nichrome wire... of I guess about 22 gauge... and about 3 feet long ... so about 3 ohms in resistance. That was to provide a length dependent voltage drop? ... and passing 1 amp of current was so as to create a voltage drop that would clearly register on your multi-mete. Anyway... that's 3 watts of power being dissipated over a very small area... so the the nichrome wire's surface temperature would start to rise quickly. Thus, it is very reasonable to fear a fire, if done near combustible materials, for an extended time. Very good video!
Ok, Another pedantic point about your example with the build up of charge in the wire as shown in 18:52. This is a great illustration, but it is misleading. The charge within the wire always redistributes to balance out forces because the charges are mobile. The potential across a wire is actually caused by extra or less charge at the *surface* of the conductor. This is because the free electrons will move until they can't move (which is at the surface interface where there is an abrupt change in conductivity). Even when there is a flow of current in the wire, it is the surface charge distribution that reaches equilibrium with the electrons bouncing around in the wire. Inside of a homogeneous conductor the distribution of charge will be uniform. This is weird because the electric field around each electron can communicate information long distances. In this case of current flow through a resistive wire, the electrons in the wire are all interacting with each other through the electric field. In this way the electrons colliding with the lattice are in equilibrium with the surface charges which are actually developing the electric field in the conductor that equilibriates to balance the effects of the "collisions" with the lattice.
As a 77 year old Amateur Radio enthusiast I am tired to the max of taking all my theory on "faith" only and not a working understanding of how it all works. Wish we had the benefit of RUclips 50 years ago. Thank you for taking the time to put this all together. God Bless...
A 71 year old Ham here. Hello and 73
You're gonna be really disappointed when you realize the theory is math based and then learn what an axiom is.
There are some really good old books for technical stuff regarding that I got some through thriftbooks I don't have access to them at the moment but I found them by looking up lists of recommended books
"HOLES AREN'T REAL!" 😂😂 I love that line.
K3TBA
as an EE grad student, this is the first time the term "electron volt" has made sense to me, never got why mass/energy was expressed as that unit
Thinking about the energy of a photon E=hf, an LED with a 2V drop will emit a photon with an energy of 2eV (red). Because each photon only reacts with a single electron. The same intuition behind the photoelectric effect. From a perspective of linear electrostatic particle accelerators, it also made a lot of sense to talk about the energy of an accelerated particle as being a function of the voltage it was accelerated by and its charge. The use of eV in particle physics world is likely a holdover from those days.
I think you’re right it is probably based on accelerators. It’s super easy to express the energy you added to a particle in eV if you multiply the charge of the thing by the voltage across the plates in your gun! As particles started splitting and ending up with different masses AND energies, I think the potential necessary to slow any given particle to a stop may also have been relevant (although now don’t they look at orbit diameters in magnetic fields?) I need to know more particle physics…
@@AlphaPhoenixChannelafaik you are right. Cyclotrons and Synchrotrons make expressing electron (or proton) energies as eV VERY attractive. And since a Joule as the "default" SI unit of energy is HUGE compared to an eV it's basically useless in this regard...
The only thing I can't tell you why is "why didn't physicists invent an in-between energy scale when they discovered the first signs of the charm/strange quarks at many many MeV" but maybe they were just used to eV by then and so we continue to this day saying an electron is 511keV...
Edit: I just tried checking wether or not "natural units" might have something to do with holding onto the eV, but couldn't find my old lecture notes. So it might be a good starting point to look into c = h_bar = e = 1 which makes basically all physical units be eV as to why we still use it instead of some other slightly better positioned unit
yes, they flat out lie to use to try to 'make it easier ' to understand. Where a clear simple explanation could deliver the principals easily. Its like saying to someone: "its just because"
1 EV was taught us as equivalent to 1 Mosquito Power
I’m a professional electrical engineer with 30 years of experience and an adjunct physics teacher. I am Old. I think this is probably the best examples I have seen for examples of voltage and current flow. Excellent job and my hat is off to you.
I have a 4 year education in the field, I feel I understand it better after his video than after 4 years of high school haha
@@CharlieTheAstronautyou probably did. Everyone equates a degree with understanding when in reality all it meant was that you could pass tests :P
Some of the most amazing teachers I’ve seen have been on RUclips. I just wish they’d get their act together and make a RUclips university.
@@stevrgrs Absolutely true. Those were four mostly wasted years of my life. We had two excellent teachers who were experts in their fields, and the rest were just people who could not get a job in the field, so they started teaching.
@@CharlieTheAstronautyeah I’m 43 and had a mentor that I learned everything from but back then society trashed everyone that didn’t have a degree or was a tradesman. I would tell people I wasn’t in school and they would look at me like I was a heroin addict.
Now I’m the one with the student loans and the tradesmen are retired and spend their days fishing and doing whatever they want 😂
I’m so glad my son will grow up with all this awesome information !
I found this video whilst trying to find someone that could explain electricity like I do so my seven year old doesn’t have to listen to me all the time :P
I have an engineering degree and I never quite understood electric flow until I stumbled upon on this gem of a presentation and I am pushing 50. Never too old to learn. Top notch.
You're able to convey information in a way that people don't just hear what you're saying but they understand it.
You use technical terms when appropriate and you also break down their meanings and give insight into what things really mean instead of leaving it behind a technically accepted definition of the word.
The point is, being able to teach things effectively and in a way that the majority understand is not a common trait.
I hope you continue to make more content and keep exercising this ability. Good teachers are hard to find.
Thank you for your kind words! I truly believe that effective teaching is a rare skill, and it's great to hear that the RUclipsr was able to convey complex information in an understandable way. As someone who values quality family time and outdoor adventures, I also appreciate products like the Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series. Its massive capacity, fast recharging, and versatile sockets make it a reliable power backup solution for camping trips and ensuring uninterrupted family time. Keep up the good work, RUclipsr!
This has by far the best explanation of voltage I have ever encountered. I am 46 and not without an education but I have never succeeded in digesting any part of the theory of electricity and I have repeatedly sought out learning materials to engage with this over the last 20+ years and never, ever felt satisfied that I had gotten beyond reciting Ohm's law. Up until about twenty minutes ago, I coud honestly say that I had no more understanding of electricity than whatever it is that comes out the end of a wizard's wand in the Harry Potter universe. The various ways of comparing 'water systems' with 'electron systems' only made the matter worse...until now. The literal demonstration with water and 'dams/resistors' is absolutely bloody amazing, breathtaking actually, and ridiculously obvious once you see it in the flesh, so to speak. Many, many thanks Brian. Absolutely excellent presentation!
It’s like having a reservoir the size of the oceans and adding a cup of water at one side and having a cup spill out the other side thousands of kilometres away. The individual water molecules don’t move very far or fast, but it’s the influence that each molecule has on the next, ie a wave, is what is carrying the electric potential effect on the other side.
This is a bit of an epiphany for me. Thank you, Brian. 🥲
I’m glad! You’re welcome! I love this phrasing - that’s a great mental image. Still off by many orders of magnitude, but much more tangibly similar to the truth than the few-inch deep channel
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel GAH, the scale is mind boggling. But I'm closer to the conceptualization of electrical systems thanks to you 🙏 You're a leader.
This actually helped for me! Thanks!
Interesting. I made a similar analogy before I saw yours. Great minds!
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel so, a field perturbation of some kind?
P.S. I’ve always had trouble conceptualizing many of the fundamentals of electricity. Your video is breaking down those walls. Thank you!
I cannot tell you how thankful I am for this. I always struggle when I can’t see ‘how’ and ‘why’ things work, and I had this issue in school where we learned to memorize things but were never explained why. It’s only as an adult that I’m relearning things for fun that i never fully grasped while supposed to be learning it
I'm exactly the same :). This is one of the few channels that really gets my attention which is why it's so good.
Omg same! If I don't understand something, maybe I can memorize it for the test (sorry, matrices; I tried) but no way is it staying in my brain!
+1
Wow, same for me. I've learned hundreds of times more, as an adult via videos like this, than I did at school. I just love knowledge now and didn't care much for it at younger ages
@@emilyrlnI suggest 3blue1brown's linear algebra list for REALLY learning how matrices work but to be proficient with them practice is necessary.
As an EE dropout that became a hobbyist and still loves this stuff... This video is fantastic! I'm gonna use it to explain the concepts to others. It's so intuitive!
Im a substation engineer for a utility company. Some new people we hire struggle to understand basic principles of electricity. In looking for a video to give a good visual understanding I found this.
Best metaphors I have ever seen. Not only did I find a better way to imagine electricity, I can also show people this to help them.
Damn.. insane to think this you can get college level knowledge for free on RUclips.
Hats off to you man. God bless🍻
Thats truly scary
This should be played in the first lecture of every EE 101 class. Very well done.
Am 45 and struggled for years to grasp voltage vs amps. This video finally made it all make sense. Thank you!!!
It can be confusing. Some people think a 12V battery with 800 cranking amps can kill, if you touch both poles, because of the high current.
But because skin has a high resistance, there is barely flowing any current if you touch both poles of a 12V battery.
Higher voltage on the other hand, forces more current through skin, but it's not the current we should worry about.
Example: Worst case you need about 1000000V before 800A can flow through skin (but it's not relevant!).
In short, it's the voltage that's dangerous.
Touching anything under 48V is unlikely to kill anyone.
But 110V for example, can surely kill you!
Edit: Some clarifications.
I'm 42 ATM and finally I can say the same :D
Now I’m down a rabbit hole with learning about high versus lower ohms, watts, wire ratings, etc. LOL
@@BrainHurricanesI learned very young at age 13 difference between voltage and amp...don't ask me how.😅
@@BrainHurricanesyou actually don’t have the concepts right. The battery supplies a voltage that is given by the electrochemical reaction used in the battery. It defines the potential difference (voltage) between the poles. There is no current associated with a battery. The current that will flow is given by Ohm’s law when a load is connected. That’s what you almost had right by referring to the resistance of a person’s body (“skin”); whatever the load R is, the current (I) will be given by I = V/R. V is fixed by the battery, but I depends on R. “Cranking amps” of a car battery, which you mentioned in your comment as if it were relevant, is only specifying the capacity of the battery (how large it is or more technically the capacity of the chemicals inside), which relates to how much current it can supply (quickly) for starting your car once the circuit is closed with a fairly low resistance of your starter. It doesn’t tell you anything about actual current that is somehow “supplies.” BTW- You can get quite injured by much less than 1 million volts, as you claim. Ask anyone who has accidentally grabbed two ends of 110V with their two hands. Current flowing across arms can stop a human heart almost instantly. I just want to make sure nobody reads your comment and thinks anything less than 1 millions volts is safe.
Thank you for being intelligent enough to teach without answering questions with an equation. Equations arent answers, they’re just tools that explain absolutely nothing about how or why. Thank you sir.
wrong.
I absolutely not agree with the statement about equations here.
The equation is not reality, rather an understanding of it. This illustration is rather a way to explain it, however absolute nanoscale precision it is not.
Agree! There is a conceptual understanding that isn't always understood by those who explain things only mathematically.
Absolutely agree, physics has the qualitative aspects that is essentialy to explain and understand the phenoms. It's not a bunch of equations to memorise
As a lifelong High Voltage Electrician I can tell all that this is absolutely the best presentation of what I've been telling folks my whole life. Great job! As I grew & developed my family and housing, my children learned physics beyond their years. Water + movement - Electricity = Work-Power
I love that! I hope to teach my children likewise someday. Understanding the basic physics of things is so satisfying when you can look at an object and think "I bet I could reverse engineer that." lol
The water model breaks down when you understand the transmission lines .. it's a terrible tool and that sets up the mind set that electrons push each other in a circuit and they don't.
@@Dazza_Doo Terrible is an exaggeration. AlphaPhoenix's demonstration even shows how water acts like a wave channeled through a waveguide. Opening the switch initiates a wavefront that travels along the channel until reaching a barrier with a new impedance, at which point it can partially reflect and partially transmit. The only thing unique to a transmission line is the electric field is a 3D vector field rather than the 1D scalar field of the water level, so you have added complexity with TE and TM propagation modes. But the root of wave propagation is the same for both water and electricity.
This a great tool for getting young minds to make analogies between things they can easily see and things that are basically invisible. Don't discredit simplicity just because it's not flawlessly accurate. Insisting on telling everyone how complex physics is dissuades many from ever attempting to pursue it. It's disheartening because, sure, some of the math is complicated and a grind to get through, but most of the physical concepts are very intuitive.
@cwithham69
Did you know there is an alternative cosmological theory called the Electric Universe?
The Thunderbolts Project and more recently Breaking the Science Barrier are Electric Universe yt channels.
@@Dazza_Dooelectrons do, in fact, push one another. Why else would there be any potential difference in a transmission line caused by a generator. Think of that for a second. The generator excites electrons near it. This excitation spreads through the electric field causing each electron to interact with its adjacent counterparts. However, this reaction isn’t instantaneous - as electrons have mass and absorb energy; therefore, the traveling wave in a transmission line is a product of a the ‘speed limit’ of the electric field. Furthermore, since electrons all possess the same charge characteristics, the fields all interact similar to a fluid. This interaction is repulsive in nature. The water model is not a great model - nonetheless. The gravity model is the best, but there is no parallel to negative charges for gravity, as antimatter’s existence is in question. The gravity model is similar because of gravitational fields and every objects linear contribution to the total given gravitational field at any point.
Not only was this explained so well, it's engaging! It's one of those rare moments when you start watching something educational and you don't want to stop because you don't feel like you're being taught a lesson, this is learning.
If education would stop focusing on learning how to solve equations but rather how to apply an equation as a solution to a problem. People would be more success remembering or becoming interested.
Loved this. I’m an 84 year old female who got thrown out of physics class.. Where were you in 1956? I’m watching this with a huge smile on my face!
My hat is off to you AlphaPhoenix because you've succeeded at completing a task that I've been trying (and failing) to do for over 40 years : i.e., Fully explaining Ohm's law and making it understandable to a layperson with no prerequisite EE knowledge in under one hour. You're the teaching hero my family needed! Many thanks to you for taking the time to make the video :)
I teach electricity and showed this to my students. About 30% of them understood it. The rest of them got lost about 10 minutes in. Think understanding electricity takes time and effort. Most people don’t understand it because they don’t want to put in the energy to learn it.
Learn the proper way. Rick Hartley on twisted wire pairs, transmission lines.
Electrons don't push each other.
The power from your home doesn't share electrons from the power station.
@@dougfoster445👍
@@dougfoster445Indeed that is always the case with understanding unfamiliar things most people just never go any further if it doesn't come to them intuitively. understanding is all about linking and making sense of facts you are given, and that rarely happens without struggle and time(the more unfamiliar the harder the struggle)
edit: should say " given information "rather than " facts" for some ... reasons
I only started AC analysis this year
but i love how all our maths is just making everything work with ohms law
Haha yeah then it’s even weirder because you can use ohms law on an instant-by-instant basis to analyze real current, or you abstract an alternating current into imaginary numbers and somehow those still play nice and linearly with abstracted impedances. It’s amazing how many bizarre systems (even within electricity) can boil down to “thing is proportional to other thing” 😂
Don’t forget Euler’s formula, and the fact that such a thing is possible only because those circuits are linear time-invariant and only sinusoidal inputs are allowed and steady-state is assumed. It’s not just thanks to “Ohm’s law”.
This is my favorite video on youtube. For YEARS I have tried to imagine how electricity actually works (using analogies). After a lot of headache, this just confirms what I was thinking AND taught me why the wire connecting to the terminals of a heating element don't also heat up (a question I've been having for a while now). Simply the best researched.
Ok, I’ve two things to say here.
1) Very good job outlining the intuitive approach to learning about electricity and how it works. I literally become a bit smarter (about this) after watching your video.
2) Your enthusiasm helped me want to learn more because it’s how I teach (automotive and criminology). So many presenters on this site merely go over formulas and surface-level material so dryly that I wonder if they’re even interested in their own lectures or explanations. The water table made things so much more understandable because I struggled with the notion of ‘potential’ regarding voltage and the water analogy made so much more sense.
Thank you!
So true, if the teacher is bored students can tell, they immediately think well if he’s not interested why should I be? The problem is if you ARE interested and desperately want to learn, it can be incredibly frustrating. I’d rather have an average teacher who cares, than some know-all who’d rather be doing something else.
This video goes right into my playlist "The best videos of the entire RUclips". So many questions that I've been wondering over from day to day at my job as an electician is awesomely explained.
I'm an electrical engineer and had till recently a very clear idea of "how electricity worked". Heck, I even wired all the electricity in my home. My understanding all started to shatter when Veritassium started talking about the Poynting vector 2 years -ish ago and *you* dear AlphaPhoenix did a follow-up video which I loved. So I'm more confused about the theory that explains why I can build such electronic marvels in the real world with no sweat 🙂 I guess that's the difference between a PhD and a Masters degree... Congrats on sustaining your thesis by the way. Never too late to celebrate.
If I've learned anything at this point it's that I don't really know anything.
i am unaware of this theory - " the theory that explains why I can build such electronic marvels in the real world with no sweat", this no sweat building theory, what is it called?
Wtf@@davidrandell2224
@@davidrandell2224I can’t square the quantum effect as described by Veritasium, whereas everything here reinforces flow.
Software and math guy here...dabbling in electronics. This is hands down the best, most illustrative and intuitive explanation I've encountered. The visual representations you chose really upset my current mental model and set it correct. Thanks so much. This is fantastic!
His education will oversee surface mount technology by robots. Useless meta pseudo philosophy not real physics
How does the Water model explain Transmission lines?
It can't. Search Electro-dynamics for answers
Same. I'm going to watch this video at least 5 times. I finally (sort of) understand negative volts.
@@jonragnarsson hmm ... all elections are negative 😊 the positive gaps are materials lacking in electrons ... happy Christmas 🎄
Have struggled with the water model for years due to lack integration of particle physics and too much anthropomorphic metaphors. This has helped a ton. Thank you for working so hard on the visuals.
I don't know what sort of introduction you had, but water analogies are absolutely where electricity should be begin. They just need to be given with the caveat that water molecules don't push on each other at a distance, they have to bump into each other (at room temperatures) and water molecules don't have another field where changes in one field affects the other. So electricity will travel through a wire faster than water in a pipe because elections will push on each other despite large gaps between them, and water won't have things like inductors. But pressure is a high level thing, and at the level of pressure they are very similar. If you were transmitting power long range with pressured water in a pipe, would you want to use low PSI and require the water to fly through the pipe at super high speed, or a high PSI and let the water move slowly through the pipe while delivering the same power? Anyone who has ever blown water through a straw will know it doesn't like to move at high speed through the straw. Its why long range power lines are 200,000V and up. You might be able to plug a low PSI pipe with your finger even if the pipe has a 1 mile diameter and turns a generator that could vaporize you. A 12V submarine battery wont do anything to you if you put your hand across the terminals but it will vaporize a fork across the terminals. Low pressure but a potential Niagara Falls of volume. There are good analogies between "ground" and the ocean also.
Voltage, Potential Difference -> Voltage is the difference between the 2 ends. It's the level of attraction the electrons feel to move from one place to another. A battery is 1.5 volts, this means there's a 1.5 difference between the 2 ends.
A home circuit of 120 volts means there's a 120 difference.
240 volts means there's a 240 difference.
As the Volts increase, the level of attraction also increases, so the electrons try way harder to get to the other side.
That's how i understand and visualise it.
HTH.
Using the water analogy, voltage is pressure from the source or supply.
Very simple
That's a neat explanation. Thanks
Within 10 minutes of this video, my entire engineering class on electricity started making sense and folding together. Thank you
"Height isn't a measure of energy."
As a hydraulic engineer I took that personally.
😏
Head is.
Blaise Pascal would have, too.
“Height isn’t a measure of energy.”
Hydraulic Engineers: Hold my beer.
thanks for mentioning XKCD's "urgent mission" and saving me the trouble of doing so myself. As an electrical engineer, this is one of my favorites. 😀
In a way Franklin did us a favor by getting the sign convention "wrong". He taught us that we have to be more flexible in our understanding of what "current" really is, and that it isn't necessarily electron flow, and also isn't necessarily in the direction charges are flowing. Had he gotten his sign convention "right", we'd learn from day 1, that current is the flow of electrons, and most people would complacently stay in the dark about other possibilities.
@@carultchI think electron drift has been solved for a long time. I’m trying to make a crookes CRT in the garage right now
Glad to know someone of your big brain understanding also struggled a lot with this concept. Although I'm familiar with the analogies you presented, I must say the way you presented them has cemented them a lot better - I do feel upgraded to having a VAGUEly decent understanding now.
Incredible work. Please explain the concept of ground next. Why do electrons want to travel to ground, why are somethings grounded and others not
Thank you for sharing this knowledge. This is something I’ve been trying to understand for 20 years. Working with electricity and diagnosing failed electrical systems as an automotive technician. Now I have a much clearer understanding of what is happening inside the circuits.
My guess for the nanosecond scale voltage-wire slice-time graph is - based on your previous videos - you might have used your oscilloscope to measure at a certain point on the wire and the input, moved the probe to another point, repeated the experiment, exported these snapshots and used some python wizardy to match them up and transform them (time vs voltage at a specific point on wire) to get the 3D graph (point on wire vs voltage vs time). Also, I think this is the best explanation and visual experiment for getting a grasp of these concepts, while also keeping it focused but still telling the small print later on, it should be played in schools. Thanks!
As always, no matter how much you know about a subject this channel always finds a different way to make you visualize the concepts!!! I love your work man, it’s of extremely high quality! That model you used to describe the random movement of electrons is AMAZING.
This is very very helpful, these are concepts i feel like I've been struggling with for over a decade. Thanks!
The one thing that I love about RUclips is people use it to teach others and take the time to have it make sense. Thank you and excellent job!
One other thing I wanted to add, your plinko table is epic. Best visual I have seen to date!
This is one of the best explanations of reactive power I’ve heard since doing my apprenticeship. Top notch.
Other videos "taught" electricity is not the actual flow of an electron from one end of a wire to the other, but more like electrons bumping its neighbor and causing the transfer of energy. As you said an electron moves very slowly vs the effect which occurs at nearly the speed of light. And that devices such as wireless chargers and transformers where there is no direct connection for electron flow. The more I seek to learn the more confused I become!
I have never studied and hardly understand anything about mathematics in this field. But I want to thank you that even I am able to understand these things through your visual experiments, at least superficially. I wish I had had a teacher like you earlier. Probably then I had studied before :)
Thank you very much for this!
Well you are studying right now. I think the hardest part about learning/studying is to find the right starting level. If there is something the teacher assumes that you know, but you don't, it can make it really difficult to realise that assumption by yourself, and it can make learning really hard. On the other hand if the teacher assumes you do not already know a lot of things, that can make learning very boring. If you are one on one with a teacher you trust, you can tell them that there is something you do not understand, or that you do understand the part they are descripting thereby you can move along. But on the other hand, if you have a book/video you can go back if you find something that you thought was less important but turned out to be very important, you can take a brake when you get tired, you can jump ahead if you are bored and other things that can be harder to do with a teacher.
But there is no doubt that a good inspiring teacher can change your life and send you down a path that you would never have ended up on without that teacher.
Understanding something start with understanding it superficial and don't let math hold you back. If math seems hard it i probably just because your are missing some peach of the puzzle (an assumption) or do not understand the syntax. Practice notering when there is a key peace if information holding you back, and how to find that peach. Do not let anyone, not even your self hold you back if there is something you would like to understand, and over timer you will see how many pieces of the puzzle that are reuse again and again and often you can get a good 20% understanding of something new without that much work. But also know that you will never be able to learn everything about anything, and that the more you learn the more you will know that you do not know. Learning can be very humbling, and most of the time we are only learning half truths, the har part it to know when a half truth is useful and when it is not. Keep it up.
Jesus Christ... next time you chatgbt it at least give some parameters to add paragraphs 😂
Makes it hard to study otherwise ✌️
@@cwarky7325 hehe... Just get good noob 🤣
I’ve been an electrician for 28 years, got an electrical engineering degree 4 years ago, work with electronics DAILY… this 39 minute video made EVERYTHING come together! Hopefully I don’t let this knowledge “equilibrate” and I can move forward. This video is SO awesome and my friend you are BRILLIANT in how you simply explained it. Thanks.
Current flows between two points when there is a difference of voltage (and hence, potential) between them. An analogy I like is that of the difference of temperature between two masses, which results in the flow of heat energy between them when a conductive path is present.
Imo, the easiest way to understand voltage is to view it as pressure from the source or supply.
The easiest..
Thanks SO MUCH for these kind of explanations! My head always did this in school and still does, I was terribly slow in doing homework because I couldn't learn formulae just like that, I had to understand them to reconstruct them at a test. haha But, though schools don't work like that, I think that's way better... understanding something makes learning easier instead of cramming formulae in your head.
I teach HS physics. This was one of the best explanations I’ve seen about the various electrical terms. Thank you! This is going to be a new video that I’ll have my students watch.
Minus one large technicality.
@@MRm3th3ad please elaborate.
Ok. I mean if your teaching it , you must imply to your students only for a reference to understanding, I also use examples to try explaining to folks in the 12volt community but , technically it's not right. Current doesn't flow through the conducter, it spirals around the outside of the conducter "wire" , nothing flows inside. So with implied examples, it kinda steers u in the wrong compression but it does help to understand resistance but then again that's not what's actually occurring.
That is so cool, you sound like a very dedicated teacher!
@@MRm3th3ad Your point is trivial and irrelevent.
The script is amazing! Every single word has been chosen perfectly.
As an aspiring HAM technician, I can honestly say that this is one of the most educating and fun to watch explanations of Ohm's Law... Kudos!! A subscription well deserved!! Greetings from Athens, Greece
Dude you are a godsend, you literally explained how electricity works better than any teacher or any learning material I've ever tried to learn from. Good stuff, thank you.
As a layman, I loved this video - it really does provide a level of intuition that I didn't get from previous explanations/analogies.
One thing not addressed is why, when there's no resistor in the circuit, the voltage drops linearly along the wire. If I had to guess, it's because the wire itself is actually infinitely many small uniform resistors in series, with infinitely many small sections where the water level is "flat". Kind of like how calculus derivatives are explained - from discrete segments of dy/dx to a smooth tangent curve (as dx approaches 0). And why does the linear drop go away when a resistor is added? Because the resistance of (any section of) the wire is now insignificant, compared to the resistance of the proper resistor. So each of the two "flat" pools of water on either side of the resistor is actually a linear drop, but with such a small height difference so as to appear flat.
Your guess is correct!
Correct. When he showed the smooth drop in voltage over the wire vs. the step when the resistor was added, he did both tests at 1 volt, which means much less current was flowing when the resistor was added. In the water trough analogy, say that when he showed the smooth gradient with no stoppers it dropped 2 cm. To make that drop, he was flowing a large amount of water and it was flowing very fast and at a uniform speed across the length of the trough. When a stopper was added, if he wanted it to still drop 2 cm over the entire distance, he had to pump much less water through the trough because it is now flowing the distance much slower on average. It is moving very slow on its way towards the stopper, so it has time to come closer to equilibrium before it reaches the stopper. It then goes past the stopper very quickly as it loses all of its "voltage" in a short distance, then moves slowly again to the exit so it comes close to equilibrium on the other side. More stoppers means the water moves slower on average and he needs less of it. This is a constant voltage power supply.
On the other hand, if he wants to keep the amount of water the same and puts in a stopper anyway, the height that the water falls at the step down of the stopper will be much higher than the original height that it dropped across the distance with no stoppers. It will still be slower than before on either side of the stopper so it will form a step, but will move much faster in the short distance passing the stopper, which will keep the average speed/amount of the water the same as it was with no resistance/stoppers. This is a constant current power supply.
Summary: For any given voltage (overall drop in height of the water over the distance of the trough), adding a resistor (stopper) will make the current drop (require less/slower moving water) and the voltage will therefore have more time to equalize on either side of the resistor. You can actually see as he moves the stoppers up (decreasing the resistance) that the water on either side starts to slope more and when he moves it down (increases resistance), it becomes more and more of a defined step. It is not the presence of just any resistor that makes the step; as the resistance value goes to 0, the voltage (water level) on either side will start to angle more and more and the curve will approach that of the original curve with no resistor. As the resistance gets higher, the curve will become more of a definitive step with the voltage on either side being more and more flat.
@@phillipthompson2347damn you’re good at this…
@@phillipthompson2347 hey in your first paragraph, why does water move slower when going towards the stopper? And why can you use the water analogy more when you said that water loses energy after it passes the stopper? And that it moves faster there.. I would really appreciate you if ya help me understand. By the way, what’s the relation of water molecules speed and curvature as it drops down across the distance
As a high school electronics major, they never really taught us to think of electricity that way, mostly how to calculate things and that has been bugging me since I've started learning electronics. This video is awesome! Love all the analogies and various explanations. It feels like I actually have a grip on those supposed-to-be basic concepts now.
Just read the textbook ffs. It literally explains all this stuff, in better detail and with far more information density. You should be reading the chapter before you go to lecture, and never take notes, since it just distracts and wastes your time. This is coming from someone who got a 3.98 GPA doing a physics major at UC Berkeley (I got 2 A-'s).
Wtf Is high school major
@@chrissantos7865Advanced diploma?
@@pyropulseIXXIwhat an embarrassing comment lol. Save this one so you can read it again in a few years. Make a note that the OP was a high schooler
I don't know what sort of introduction you had, but water analogies are absolutely where electricity should be begin. They just need to be given with the caveat that water molecules don't push on each other at a distance, they have to bump into each other (at room temperatures) and water molecules don't have another field where changes in one field affects the other. So electricity will travel through a wire faster than water in a pipe because elections will push on each other despite large gaps between them, and water won't have things like inductors. But pressure is a high level thing, and at the level of pressure they are very similar. If you were transmitting power long range with pressured water in a pipe, would you want to use low PSI and require the water to fly through the pipe at super high speed, or a high PSI and let the water move slowly through the pipe while delivering the same power? Anyone who has ever blown water through a straw will know it doesn't like to move at high speed through the straw. Its why long range power lines are 200,000V and up. You might be able to plug a low PSI pipe with your finger even if the pipe has a 1 mile diameter and turns a generator that could vaporize you. A 12V submarine battery wont do anything to you if you put your hand across the terminals but it will vaporize a fork across the terminals. Low pressure but a potential Niagara Falls of volume. There are good analogies between "ground" and the ocean also.
I only just started this video but I can tell that this is exactly what I needed. The craziest part to me is that yesterday I was telling somebody that I always wanted to learn how electricity works and today this video is the first thing that pops up. Thank you Siri for listening to me and my private conversations.
8:49 "Voltage is weird." I don't know how many videos/things I've read to try and understand voltage and you're the first to put it in these terms. Thank you. Great explanations.
Think of it as pressure
I did have a bit of a chuckle at seeing the vacuum permittivity constant described as "some useless constant"
I had also assumed that your electricity waves we're going to be based on solving Maxwell's Equations... Now I'm really looking forward to seeing how you went about actually measuring that!
The analogy of playing with waves on a very deep ocean and the size needed of the trough to represent a 1 volt drop just blew my mind and makes an infinite amount of sense to me.
It really demonstrates how powerful the electric force is, that even such a small, imperceptible change in the total can have such a remarkable effect in things like railguns and high explosives. Imagine if you could access the depths of that abyss.
@@DFPercush Boggles the mind. Imagine having the motive potential of every electron available to you. Not just what comes out one end of a conductor.
Every time I start to think "Hmm, quite a bit of time since the last AlphaPhoenix upload" it only takes a few days and I see a new video from you!
May be I should think about that more often :D
Your enthusiasm is just so. Friggen. Captivating. It's like the knowledge connects to my brain, making me understand your enthusiasm, which makes the connection stronger and repeats until the "path of least resistance" is cleared and it all just flows so smoothly. I'm excited as HELL for the next one!
Yeah, when a teacher is enthusiastic you instinctively want to join the party. He’s excited, maybe I should be too!
Hands down the BEST and most complete video I have seen on OHMs law, I love your examples, the infrared cameras and analogies used! If my school would have had a teacher like you 35 years ago I might have become an electrician :). Thanks for creating this content!
This video is incredibly taught and gave me so much insight on what I'm actually doing when working with electricity. Thank you so so much for this
The live graph at 30:49 might be the coolest representation in electronics that I've seen. What a great thing to show at the end of the explanation. That super worked for me! ❤
56 year old engineer here - ths is one of the best demos of Ohm's Law I have ever seen.
Best. Explanation. Ever.... And I have two engineering degrees and 25 years in the field.
This is one of the best f*cking videos on RUclips I’ve ever watched. Fellow electrician here, (“slightly” ***biased***) moving into the renewable and industrial sector, and you synthesized numerous analogies of electrons for me into concepts and comparisons that are right up my brain’s alley. I wish my subscription paid you, because you’ve earned a lifetime subscription from me. Cheers to you dawg. You’re the real deal and the definition of the Good the internet is meant to be for mankind!
I am a 83 year old electronic hobby student playing at it during the 1960's. Getting married and making a living in Architecture I have been retired for some time got involved with radio control systems for model aircraft and now trying to catch up with the micro chip age to keep
my brain alive. Thank you for the video .
I love electric RC
Wow that tabletop demonstration of resistance with all of the videos overlayed is really cool 👍
That was my Aha! moment for sure.
Yeah that was super decent.
The key new intuition I actually gained from this was understanding why and how resistors convert electrical energy to heat, rather than simply understanding that they do
Seems pretty obvious it is due to collisions; this is stuff you can easily deduce as a 13 year old by just knowing that things are made of atoms and particles
I have to believe this video will benefit many many people and could make a definite difference in people’s potential career choices. Massive thanks Nd kudos. Finally I can start to much better why the wheels turn on my electric car 😆👍
"Playing with waves on top of a very deep ocean" is a good analogy, Also explains a bit about how static electricity can achieve such high voltages under certain circumstances. Love the work.
I need to watch this every week just to keep it clear in my head. By far the best description I have ever seen. Thank you.
Repetition is the key to good learning, get it stuck in your head, like listening to a great song.
I agree Im 72 and dropped my first electronics class in Jr college because the teacher was former Stanford instructor and required his own book for his class. The first chapter I was totally lost he was talking hole theory chemistry and moles, Physics and electron valences. I just wanted to be a technician not a physics buff. It was like Taking us skiing down a Black Diamond hill. Before we knew how to snowplow. This video helped a lot But I'll have to watch a few more times. I dont get how electrons move from atom to atom at the speed of light. There has to be some minute fraction of a second where the atom changes from what it was. interesting that Voltage can make atoms and electrons more pressure and volume. Higher potential to flow. But what of high voltage low amps. I'll watch again :)
This is the first video I've seen about electricity where someone actually explains what electricity is, how it acts, and why it acts that way. Many other videos only explain what electricity is, and how it acts, not why it acts that way. Every other video has left me with the question "but why", except this one. Thank you!
Electricity is a magical mysterious force, we do not deign to explain things logically
@@puppergump4117 electricity itself is not magical and mysterious. But energy is. We can only explain how energy functions, but not what it is.
@@Dimitrij088 I know but a lot of "teachers" forget that. And in some cases, such as quantum entanglement, the best expert's guess is as good as mine.
@@puppergump4117 we know how elictricity works, ok.
@@Dimitrij088 Electricity itself is created using principles we don't fully understand. Unless you can explain how magnetism works or why specifically its effects are able to generate electricity. Until then we're stuck using "magic" and thinking we know it all.
This is amazing, thank you so much, I've slowly been teaching myself this after decades of being interested in electronics, and only recently have I really started to understand what's going on. This really cleared things up in my mind.
It'd be awesome if you followed on with the "Holes" and went into semiconductors.
While I kinda understand how transistors work, it'd be nice to have some of your smart analogies to explain it better, especially with things like mosfets which still confuse me quite a bit.
Semi conductors are dielectric materials (like silicon) doped with conductors p or n (phosphorus, gallium etc..) when a threshold of current is met the gate/drain switches open and supposedly the electrons "skip" across "holes" (i don't believe in electrons) but I won't confuse you on that point.
The easiest way to think about it is that it is intermediate composite material between insulators and conductors placed between conductives like a little draw bridges that opens for current switch junctions or flow direction when electrostatic conditions are met.
If they “don’t believe in electrons”, don’t let them confuse YOU…😂
In semiconductors, as in metals, most of the electrons are locked in place because they are used in bonding. The difference is in metals, electrons can start moving down a wire if they gain just a TINY bit of energy - energy they can get just by the material being warm. In semiconductors, any given electron would need to gain a LOT of energy before it could start to flow, so the vast majority of them don’t - they’re stuck.
You can insert trace impurities of other atoms called dopants that basically add electrons that already have a bit more energy, that way again they only need a little bit to start moving like in a metal. By fiddling with the concentration of these dopants, and by applying electric fields across the entire material, you can create a device that sometimes has no mobile electrons so it’s an insulator, and sometimes has many mobile electrons and acts like a conductor.
All insulators could really be referred to as “high bandgap semiconductors”. There are even people trying to make electronics out of diamond, which is an extreme insulator.
For anyone wanting a great introduction to Ohm's Law, or electricityin general, WATCH THIS. I'm a math, physics, and astronony professor for the last quarter century, although my degrees are in engineering (civil/structural). Just want to say, in all the ways and levels of teaching E&M (tech students to EE majors, i.e., simple algebra to calc based), these analogies are beautiful, and your explanations perfect. Voltage is abstract, it takes a while to really get a feel for "electric potential energy per unit charge." For physics students, there's great ways to build on this from Mechanics. However, the water analogy I find to be the most useful. The visualization and tangibility is immediately accessible. Now, remember, when caulking, you need to follow the 3 contact surface rule! Lol
Voltage is how fast the river is flowing, amps are how many ducks are in the water(ducks hurt) and resistance is a log sticking out into the river or a boulder in the river.
You’re an amazing teacher. Love the way you explain and show all this. Most teachers can’t teach to make the information stick and make it fun. You can! Thank you!
This is AMAZING! I've been searching for YEARS looking for an intuitive explanation for voltage and Ohm's law and why it works the way it does. The water pressure thing never really quite made sense to me (since I felt like it broke down when you thought about it hard enough), but comparing voltage to water *height* instead of *pressure* suddenly made everything work. I love that explanation! This was a fantastic video to watch.
"Why electrons follow Ohm's Law"? Respect for authority!
This came up on my feed. You perked my interest when I saw the texbook in your hand - Horowitz and Hill, The Art of Electronics. Thank you so much for taking their analogies, and making them colorful and 3 dimensional. This is true learning, and the sign of a gifted teacher.
Haven’t yet finished watching (as it takes me a couple of rewatches per concept), but it’s already clear to me that you’ve made brilliant job understanding it yourself and explaining it to us. I was searching for this “deep intuition” for a very long time and now I’ll stick here for a while. Sincere gratitude and respect, sir. Please, keep making these videos
"All models are wrong, Some are useful, Very few are Magical"
incredible video thank you, i find this water channel model quite a lot more intuitive than the usual water in a pipe model we get shown in schools.
this plus your "Path of Least Resistance" video have really furthered my understanding of electricity
I think i get your analogies for voltage, or potential difference, but there are some parts for voltage i dont get. Like, a 9 volt battery would produce 9 volts worth of potential difference between the two sides of the resistor, and that 9 volts is basically electrons denser on one side and less dense on the other. If thats the case, then wouldnt current be different for the 2 parts of the curcuit? Current is amount of moving electrons passing through a point per unit time, but if the electrons are less dense, as in less compact, on one side of the circuit, the current wouldnt be the same everywhere, right? And from my physics classes, i remember clearly that current must be the same everywhere. So im probably missing something, could someone explain it for me? (1. Im talking about a basic series circuit. 2. When i say electrons are "less dense", i mean like less electrons per unit area, opposite with "more dense")
It’s very similar to water being “incompressible”. From the perspective of pressure, and pressure causing water to flow, of course water is compressible, but the actual change in volume with pressure is so minuscule that it doesn’t matter when you are calculating stuff like flow rates. Technically the electrons in one part of the wire are going faster to produce the same current but it’s SO slight you could never measure it. The water “channel” model doesn’t handle it very well because unlike a pipe, the water channel changes in volume a lot!
Ooh I think I get it, thxx
@@AlphaPhoenixChannelso there are more electrons on one side, but the other side where there’s less elections has the electrons moving faster?
This has to be THE BEST explanation of how ohm's law works that I've ever seen. I generally have trouble understanding abstract concepts. So to see it in physical form and explained this way was awesome!! Thank you so much!! I am now excited about electricity again and it's applications! I've had basic electronics 101 training back in the 1990's and have used it on my job as a Multi-craft Technician. But my understanding of the concepts were, this is how it works and that's it!
I am a person that needs to know why, things work the way they do to fully understand it! This teaching accomplishes that!
The funny thing is that I've played with electronics more than plumbing, so the water analogy tends to only help me understand how plumbing works more instead lol
OK, can you explain me how to create water pressure regulator? And is the simple water valve pressure or flow regulator?
@@ksrele A valve will act like a variable resistor.
If pressure is fixed you regulate flow, if the flow is fixed you regulate pressure.
In order to construct a regulator you would need to incorporate some reference as a setpoint and some sort of measurement for feedback.
First misunderstanding: As newtons' apple had positive potential energy, it was assumed that electrons did too. (having "negative" potential was the "flaw", as Ben Franklin theorized... kinda-sorta a vacuum) A graphic of electron movement at the atomic level may be helpful, possibly including to indicate why conductors conduct (i.e "shells"); As for general electron "flow" direction (i.e. cumulative electron repulsion), that depends on the relative positions (vs. nucleus) of the orbiting electrons, from atom to atom. To wit: a negatively charged electron only has potential when between an electro-magnetic field of force, has a difference of 1 volt. think of ping-pong balls in front of/behind a fan, direction limited between two walls. It's not the "speed" of the electrons, but the cumulative quantity of electrons, in a particular direction. Think: bowling pins.
Holy cow, that was in INTENSLY good video. As an engineer, I watch a lot of these type videos and this one REALLY stood out. I am so much smarter for having watched this , I cant thank you enough. Just really really good stuff.
This is why you are one of the best content creators out there. You have a talent for explaining complex phenomena in ways that can be easily understood.
I've been learning and teaching this topic for a long time, and always thoughts there must be a more intuitive/ accurate way of thinking about it than the traditional pipes and pump model. I've searched long and hard, never finding anything, so for me this video is genuinely wonderful.
I have been watching videos that explain this-most of them are much shorter-and this video is, at least for me, easily the best and most understandable. This topic and these concepts require time to digest and i really appreciate the fact that you took the time to explain them. You are a very good teacher.
This is the best video I've seen in attempting to get my stupid brain to comprehend voltage.
Thank you for taking the time and effort.
I thought I understood volts
Voltage is a force
Current is charge
Apply voltage through wire
You can move Current through wire
You just move the electrons on a wire
Power is combined Force x Current
You just got a work
Power is Work
Power will not exist without applying a force
To a Charge
Until you apply a Force and the Current will travel
And it is call Power = Work that's it
@@JoseHambalos @10:47 “voltage is not a force”…
@@mdrdprtcl thanks I understood now it's a potential "Difference"
Thank you. Welcome back.
I wish i had this video when i was learning about this stuff. Probably the best explanation i have seen!
I’m not sure that it’s possible to accessibly explain this stuff any better than you have here. Absolutely outstanding video!
The real interesting thing that happens with that model is when R -> 0 but only from the intensity point of view, and it explains why high school Engineers and Scientists to be burn up so many power sources in the electronics lab.
Thank god for fuses right? Anyways I do remember the day (during middle school) when the concept finally clicked for me, and it was in fact water: height of the waterfall analog to Voltage; amount of water analog to Amperage...
Anyways it would have not happen hadn't my Granpa taken me on so many camping to river sights, and my fair share of bumping against river rocks, so like Indiana Jones once said: Get out of the library!
Thank you for such cool videos, they are delight!
I think it's really fun to imagine the electron-as-hill-of-potential. So you have your electron, and you have to push it up a hill to get it close to the other electron. But the electron itself is a hill, so you end up pushing a hill up another hill, which is hilarious to me.
That actually is the missing intuition I needed to understand why the energy is stored in the electric field, thank you so much!!! Also, I agree that it’s very funny lol.
would the coiling of a spring be a better analogy then? like two springs pushing against each other and storing energy as they do so?
This is like free college.
This is one of the best channels on youtube. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with the world.
Thank you so much for this! Definitely a breath of fresh air after Veritasium's misinformed video
I've never studied any of this, but I appreciate the effort it took so we can have this great visualization of electricity. Mega job.
God I love this channel. You present things at a level that is neither condescending nor too technical. There are so many super intro level videos out there and then super advanced level shit and nothing in between. You bring advanced insight to these concepts I "knew" but never understood this intuitively! Keep it up man!
Wow, that way very informative and you explain things well.
30+ years in power generation, but most electronics I dealt with were "plug and play." I had to retire early for health reasons so I decided this would be a great hobby because I could do w/o a lot of moving around.
At 60, my ability to learn new things isn't quite as sharp as it was years ago. Your video made it so easy to follow along. You are a bright young man and I'm going to watch more of your videos right now.
Subbed and bell on! Thanks for helping folks like myself!
Thank you.
I always thought of Voltage as electrical pressure, like in a pneumatic system, and batteries like balloons for electricity. That's what it felt like riding an e-bike without a boost converter to maintain the exact voltage. Motor is the most lively with a fully charged battery. But would act so tired as the battery depleted, like an almost empty balloon pushing less & less. This would be more noticeable with the linear voltage drop of capacitors, since bstteries have a nominal voltage they vaguely sit at, making their discharge curve look like an A instead of a straight line.
And like a balloon with sticky insides.
A battery pops if you overfill it. And us also damaged if you let it deflate too much. And also damaged by constantly going from full to empty, instead of keeping it in a smaller inflation range in the middle. Like between 20 and 80%. Batteries are less stressed out, staying around 50%.
Right analogy?
I loved this video. I studied electronics back in 1989 - 1992 and my electronics instructor, though he would use the water analogy at times, would always say that we should not depend on it for our internal understanding of electron flow because he said it was only a loose parallel to the reality and not descriptively accurate ... And here you are making a strong case for it being very accurate. Whatever the truth ... you have taught me a much better understanding of voltage than I ever had before. And for that, I thank you!
Thanks for your time to put together an amazing video. This is better explanation that what 99% (or likely 100%) of EE students get in their college courses and you passion to teach is impressive.