FAQs and corrections in this comment! Also: I'm starting a Patreon! patreon.com/AlphaPhoenix And a second channel! ukposts.info/the/3GrRPAydgBn42lab2izBlg.html 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)

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

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.

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 UKposts 50 years ago. Thank you for taking the time to put this all together. God Bless...

"Height isn't a measure of energy." As a hydraulic engineer I took that personally.

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 only started AC analysis this year but i love how all our maths is just making everything work with ohms law

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.

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 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.

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 :)

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

Am 45 and struggled for years to grasp voltage vs amps. This video finally made it all make sense. 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, man, you are one of a kind. Please dont stop doing these. Youre doing a big service to humans. Thank you.

56 year old engineer here - ths is one of the best demos of Ohm's Law I have ever seen.

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!

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. 😀

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.

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

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.

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.

Wow that tabletop demonstration of resistance with all of the videos overlayed is really cool 👍

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is some really heavy stuff that would normally be miles over my head, but you’ve found a way to explain it simply while not watering down the important points. Very well done my dude 👌

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.

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.

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!

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!

Thank you so much! as a mechanic who has been in the field for 5 years this is the first time anything about ohms law made sense in my head, I finally have a confident understanding!

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!

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

I really feel blessed to have found this post. I am in awe of the intensity of enthusiasm which you display ! Thank you

You're the best kind of nerd. Genuine enthusiasm and excitement is apparent. Thanks for helping me make sense of this crazy information.

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!

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'm a computer engineer. Took a lot of Electrical Engineering course, of course, and in my Electromagnetics and Optics course (Physics 261 at Purdue), I scored 399/400 (all in exams, as that prof didn't give credit for homework). AND I THINK THIS VIDEO IS GREAT because it still taught me stuff and provided me new ways of looking at problems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

absolutely brilliant, - after 4 years of materials science school and 2 years as a materials scientist, this concept has never made so much sense to me! Love this channel!

"Why electrons follow Ohm's Law"? Respect for authority!

Your enthusiasm and desire to explain reality in a way that makes it all make sense, is both engaging and incredibly beneficial for those with a desire to understand the matter you present fully. Absolutely an alpha channel.

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 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!

I absolutely love your teaching style. I had a fair grasp of what voltage is before watching and have come away feeling I now have a solid grasp of what actually happens.

"All models are wrong, Some are useful, Very few are Magical"

What a great explanation! I've learned Ohm's law back in the 80th but never digged into it this deep. This was a clear, intuitive, eye-opener! 👏👏

One of the best Analogy I heard was a spring ontop of a mountain for Voltage. The height is the voltage, the narrowness of the channel down the mountain is analogous to resistance and the speed of water is the amperage.

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 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

Hands down the best description I've ever come across. Thanks for your work

Only watched half of this so far and already I have a better grasp than any electronics course I've taken. I'm a chemistry major and that part of my brain constantly tries to tear apart any analogy I've ever about electricity as being water through a garden hose. So thank you!

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!

The Terry Gilliam inspired trumpets for Ohm is perfect. Nice touch there. You can also think of voltage as pushing a beach ball under water and once you let go the buoyancy inherent in the system requires the ball to rise to the surface with some amount of force which = ma not really of the ball which contributes a very small fraction but the water around it and the air pressure above the water forcing the ball to come to rest on the surface. Therefore voltage is not a force in and of itself but a certainty that energy will be transformed from one form to another. In the case of the ball, the buoyancy potential is transformed into kinetic energy until it comes to rest. The same is true of voltage which will remain until whatever is causing the voltage stops causing it and bam, through current and resistance over a very short time, equilibrium is reached just like a ball full of air floating on water. The real big difference in the analogy is that the ball will try to float no matter what assuming you're on earth at sea level. Electricity needs a medium to conduct the energy transformation in. It needs not just any electrons but movable electrons around it to transform the potential into what ultimately becomes kinetic energy. That's why conductive materials conduct the transformation of energy from a voltage potential into a current which moves and encounters resistance through that conductive medium. That's also why a battery can store that voltage potential if there is no medium or conductor available for it to get out (mostly, batteries always leak a tiny bit all the time). And then there's another thing to add. Even if there is a conductor attached to the battery, unless it's connected as a circuit, there's nowhere for that potential to go so it saturates what is connected and that too becomes part of the battery leaking a tiny bit as well over time. It's when you complete the circuit that the voltage can be relieved and the electrons truly flow according to the potential (voltage) contained within the battery generally by chemical means. A battery is literally like pushing a beach ball under water and then trapping it. Connecting the battery to a circuit (with a load which is important) is like removing the lid of the trap. As the ball rises to the surface kinetic energy (current) is gained like in the current created from a battery but once the ball is floating on the surface, that's the same as saying the battery is dead. There is no potential left. Maybe Voltage could be better explained by the tendency and amount of it for a system to try to reach equilibrium. I mean, it's just a long way of saying potential. The more a system wants to reach equilibrium, the higher the Voltage. You're flipping right. It's really piss complicated to describe or understand with common objects and ideas. I actually think current is weirder. It's not electrons flowing so much as it is the potential (voltage) seeking its way to equilibrium down the wire that is moving. The electrons themselves hardly move at all even though they are moving randomly at stupendous speeds. They do actually move through the circuit but they only move a teensy tiny fraction of the speed that the current moves as a quite literal wave. Water molecules don't move very far but the waves themselves move really far and the energy isn't in the molecules themselves. It's the wave of interactions that carries the energy from one place to another losing a tiny fraction of that total energy every step of the way in the form of heat which is another word for atoms and molecules jiggling around. That's also whey people call the end of the universe the heat death of the universe. It's when there are no more waves left and that everything is in equilibrium. There is still energy there but since everything is in equilibrium there's nothing to change anything else. Everything is simply a soup of latent energy which unless we come up with some new physics is the ultimate end of all things uncountable years in the future. A pure equilibrium.

Been watching your videos for a while, and your water model has been one of the best analogy I have ever seen.

You are an OUTSTANDING educator. Thank you!

Thank you. Welcome back.

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.

Brilliant. Thank you. I'm tasked with giving a workshop on "renewable energy" to a group of 4th graders. I have built a bike generator to help convey the mystery of "electric power." Your skillful blend of physics and intuitive experiential emersion will help me convey these invisible concepts.

This video goes right into my playlist "The best videos of the entire UKposts". So many questions that I've been wondering over from day to day at my job as an electician is awesomely explained.

Nice job on the video. Your demonstrations helped clear up some confusion I had about voltage.

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 .

These videos are the best I've ever seen explaining how this stuff works. My understanding (I've taught this stuff a bunch of times, not sure how effectively) of something as simple as ohm's law has been taken up a level with this video. I never thought as deeply as you have. Decades ago when I worked as a carpenter and messed up some siding cuts on some rather expensive redwood vertical siding, a more experienced fellow told me to "think like a drop of water" That explained everything. You are doing the same thing for electrons. Great work!

Ive been excited for this series of videos since you were talking about making your "water analogue video" way back. I love this model so much and I'm so happy you are talking about the fields and waves and velocity and all that. Great job man!

That's an interesting analogy for electron flow, indeed very intuitive, better than the traditional hydraulic analogy used in many electronic/electricity fundamentals courses (mine introductory chapters in class included). One thing you mentioned that helps it is that the model is slow enough so you can see thing happening, and showed an actual transient and wave behavior; I was wondering if you could also show sinusoidal steady state (ac) in the model also, by making the pump somehow oscillate sinusoidally the height/pressure. Your model would probably show some inductance analog (since water has inertia) and capacitance analog (I think inertia also plays a role as such, but in the y direction); if you make the pump frequency (source) high enough (I would guess, wavelength in the order of magnitude of the size of the features of the model), I would bet you'd get some interesting transmission line effects in the model such as reflection, Ferranti, half wavelength lines, termination, impedance matching, etc

Electronics tech for 40 years, best explanation I've ever seen. Awesome video!

This was probably the best explanation, to the question of how electricity works that I've heard. Finally understood it. Not that I'd be able to repeat it to anyone, but I at least understood it.

A lot of people get confused about the difference between voltage and current. I remember at school the thing that helped me separate them was when my friend said " Current flows. Voltage just 'is'. "

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.

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.

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

I wish i had this video when i was learning about this stuff. Probably the best explanation i have seen!

I thought I understood volts

W O W ! . . . i am a physics teacher with more than 18 years of experience and have been using the water model, but never at this detail . . .! My mind is stretched . . . !!! Superb . . .

Nice job! I’ve been working with electricity all my adult life. Electrical maintenance, electrical engineering and substation work. This video was informative. You know your stuff! Thanks!

The ball and hill analogy nearly caused me an epiphanic seizure. Something in my head clicked so hard, I almost blacked out. I'm being facetious, of course, but you literally unlocked 1 component of like 50 things I've been studying, and all of them fell into place in that instance.

This would be an amazing video!😊

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!

This kid just answered so many questions I have had about electricity. Not a grad student or anything, just someone who loves to play with and learn about electricity. I have struggled with the concept of voltage for years, and he made it finally make sense to me. Well done kid, you are extremely sharp. I will be happy to subscribe. Can't wait to learn more.

They don't "follow Ohm's law" They reliably behave in a manner described by Ohm's law.

You have runners on a track, the first runners are fast nothing block them, the last take more time to finish, the resistor is an obstacle to the runners, so everyone runs to the resistor and then must pass it while being bunched up. Very cool video :)

This is the most intuitive visualization for ohms law and voltage I've come across. Well done!

This is great!!! Your demonstration creates a valuable mental picture and gives understanding

A fantastic description of electricity with simply models. Thanks for making this!

You helped me understand in minutes what i’ve read and studied for years. Thank you this has changed my view on electricity

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.

Your graph at the end did it for me. Once I saw the measurement, it all made sense. My intuition "Believed you".

Excellent visuals and explanation. 75 year old EE. If only we had professors with your talent instead of those that read from a book to the class!

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!

OMG this is the BEST explanation I have ever heard. I am an Electrical Engineer grad. Really amazing

thank you, you are talented to explain difficult things using simple examples you would think in the ocean of information available today there would be similar high quality explanations available, but for me it's the first time I encounter such a thorough explanation with the intent of making it simple to understand