How electricity actually flows

But didn’t it suggest impurities increase the flow of electrons.:nerd_face:

I think it says impurities increase the scattering of electrons, which may interfere with or distort the flow of electrical signals.

Thanks for posting this - it’s a very good video.

Nick Lucid, who makes Science Asylum videos, has been discussing energy, QFT, thermodynamics and electricity and related topics for years on YouTube.

Here is his playlists on Electric Circuits:

And his video on electric flow in wires:

His style is humourous, but his understanding of physics is excellent, and his ability to make sense of the limits of English in explaining the relationships between the quantum world and energy is impressive.

Has there been any mention of magnets and magnetism yet ??

because unless you form a circuit with the conductor, you are not the endpoint target for the energy transfer. That doesn’t change. Go back and watch the video again. The energy flowing from the battery is still directed towards the object completing the circuit (the bulb).

Just watched it again.

It claims impurities/missing atoms drive electron flow. Therefore without the impurities/missing atoms there would be no flow.

Also, it seems to indicate the lattice waves are a necessity.

If the flow of energy outside the cable core results in the bulb lighting, shielding the bulb from this energy would prevent it from lighting.

A 20 second clip at the end of the video showing a bulb being switched on and off by removing then replacing a shield would have proved the theory. If it is correct. :thinking:

I am very certain that:

  • That would not work and…
  • The video is massively simplied for a wide audience to not go into such details. There is more that it isn’t telling you than is.

And why? Because often a simpler, if not completely accurate understanding of something is sufficient and expedient for most engineering purposes. Thinking wires “carry” electricity serves us and probably most engineers very well.

Consider this. Newtonian physics is wrong and surpassed by Einstein’s theories. Yet Newtonian gravity works really well at the micro scale so everyone who’s not designing spacecraft still uses it.

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Yes, the M in EM stands for magnetism.

Many of the videos linked to above discuss the relationship between the E and M halves of the EM field.

From Wikipedia:
Magnetic energy and electrostatic potential energy are related by Maxwell’s equations. The potential energy of a magnet in a magnetic field is defined as the mechanical work of the magnetic force on the re-alignment of the vector of the magnetic dipole moment. Energy is also stored in a magnetic field.

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Yes, and this problem extends to what many people believe the world and ‘things’ are.

Many people use the word ‘physical’ to describe a category of ‘things’.

They are quite sure they know what ‘physical’ means.

But when you ask them to define what they mean by ‘physical’, the majority of people (including in my experience most academics and many people with training in physics) will very rarely be capable of coherently saying what they mean by ‘physical’ (vs. whatever other categories they use).

So, basically I’ve wasted nearly 15 minutes watching a video that doesn’t show me a lot, and what it does show me is inaccurate. :crazy_face:

Nope.

You watched it twice, so you wasted nearly half an hour. :grinning:

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That was a different video.

I’ve just watched the videos you posted, so, in total I’ve wasted over an hour. :thinking:

But to be fair the videos you posted where quite entertaining. :grinning:

But, I’m not entirely convinced he knows the difference between laminar flow and turbulent flow.

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I experience the difference almost every day.

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Funny, most pilots think turbulent flow is a problem, and yet without it you wouldn’t stay airborne…

Without turbulent flow, your Carnot engine would be unlikely to achieve sufficient efficiency to be able to generate sufficient thrust to give the lift needed to overcome the effect of gravity. However that’s not quite so bad as it seems on first inspection: it still wouldn’t result in an uncontrolled descent into terrain, as, without that thrust you wouldn’t have been able to take off in the first place!
:stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Not all of Maxwell’s equations have been covered in the videos. If you accept the intuitive classical idea of an electron or any charged particle, then in a basic model of a system consisting of stationary electron there is no magnetic field. If somehow we create an external electric field the electron will move and acquire energy from the electric field. The moving electron (current) creates a magnetic field. Another of Maxwell’s equations says that there are no free magnetic charges!

So in a radio transmitter a radio frequency alternating electric field in a conductor emits radio waves. If ‘moving electrons’ did not create a magnetic field there would be no electromagnetic waves. We would be pretty stuffed because there would be no such thing as space and time!

The curious thing about the thing we call an electron is that it has an intrinsic magnetic dipole moment. For any system there is no magnetic field flowing into or out of a closed surface surrounding the system. It’s a bit like having a positive and negative electric charge quite close together. If you are far enough away you would not know that there was one positive charge and one negative charge. As you get closer however the nature of the field is revealed. This is what we call a dipole field.

So electricity and magnetism are just the two faces of one phenomenon. Quantum Field Theory takes it all one step further to a mind boggling level. Accepting that there is a fundamental unit of charge is one step but then Standard Model introducing quarks with 1/3 and 2/3 electric charges of either polarity. Where will it all end! We still have no unified theory that incorporates gravity.

BTW Brian Cox’s latest series on the Universe is quite good by episodes 4 and 5.

Phil

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Same here. Normally after a good hot curry !

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Unified Field Theory, I expect.

And after that there will be more!

Phil

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Yes, there is no end point in science.

I think it is impossible in principle for living beings to understand everything about the world in which they live.