The Big Misconception About Electricity

The video isn't relevant to lumped circuits, speakers wires, interconnects etc..

I don’t agree completely with his answer "D". That is true for a small circuit shown in his diagram but for large circuits inductance comes into play and he even alluded to that. In real life his super large circuit is going to take a lot of voltage to overcome the large inductance of that 1000’s of kilometers of wire. It takes time to build and collapse those E/M fields. Old style incadesent bulbs will start glowing almost immediately even as the voltage is building once the switch is closed but LED bulbs will not light up below a certain voltage. I notice that when I flip a switch in a room now it takes a brief moment for the LED bulbs to turn on.

Also, he mentioned that high tension (ie voltage) lines are suspended high in the air to keep away from the damp earth. Isn’t it also due to iron in the earth which would increase the impedance and/or inductance of the wires? Our neighborhood power lines are underground but the high tension wires remain above ground.

PS. I’m a mechanical engineer talking about electricity, I know. But if you all start making fun of me then I’ll start talking about electrical engineers who design electrical connectors.

Looking at the comment above, another interesting thing occurs, a side point of interest....with the various qualities of inductance as tied to inductor build and design. In the pure physics of the electric aspect as tied to inductor physical build. regarding the electron phenomena as we consider it, in atomic level physics, and the concept of inductance.

(the way we usually use electricity in engineering analysis takes none of this into consideration, thus some of the critical subtleties we deal with in audio are not taken into account in the analysis we see happening on forums)

Where above the knee or peak of the Q of an inductor, that the given inductor is a better quality of capacitor than an outright ’bog standard’ capacitor.

Which is only one small point of note to help clarify that most (OK, all) engineering analysis uses lumped or simplified parameters or simplified explanations where the originating atomic and hard/core physics levels of explanations of the underlying physics of electricity --- goes missing, it is MIA. by choice, by necessity, otherwise nothing could be built, the analysis would be too complex and for the most part, unnecessary to the given physical task at hand that is to be engineered.

Such a statement (about inductors) would require careful unpacking, of course. I leave it up to the given reader to pursue such on their own.....

It comes back to that general ’truism’ that I put out there at times, which goes like: "The longer the problem sits unresolved, the more fundamental the error in the formulation of the question."

Excellent video.

What really got me was when he says in the video at around 2:30 that the electron flow from the power station to the house is “interrupted” because of the transformers. Well, that’s really bad because it almost looks like he hasn’t understood how a transformer works and that on the secondary side to which the transformer is connected there are electrons in the conductor as well and as they don’t really have to flow but just “wiggle” there is no need for one “uninterrupted” conductor for the electrons to flow. It’s only necessary to make them “wiggle” on the other side which a transformer achieves through the electromagnetic field.

And then the “flow in only one direction” from power station to house and not the other way in the case of AC. Why would the power flow back from the house to the power station through the same wire if the appliances in the house are the connection to ground for the current that flows to the house through the hot wire? The loop is closed through the ground connection. It “wiggles” back and forth including the ground connection .

But the biggest problem for me is how to combine Ohm’s law with the understanding that it’s not through the flow of electrons through a conductor -which still exists according to the video- but through fields that power is transmitted from point A to B (video: 7’-9’).

What would that mean for a circuit in an amp for example considering resistors and their function?  How would they be able to transform energy to heat and thus lower voltage or current where it’s necessary without the flow of electrons in a resistive path? And how would we have to re-evaluate the operation of an electronic tube or transistor in a circuit?

The source signal (music) seems to flow from input to output (so called “signal path”) but the reality is that the current flows at each stage of amplification from one pole of the power supply to the opposite pole through the tube or transistor (only triggered by the music signal) which as a consequence creates the higher output voltage we are interested in for driving loads like speakers (at least in case of voltage amplifiers). How would we describe what happens in an active device like a tube or transistor for example with this field-transfer theory?  

And what about local or global feedback which most amps use for keeping distortion down or increasing impedance etc.? With Ohm’s law  and current flow through wires it can be easily explained, calculated, and practically verified. With this “field theory” I wouldn’t even know where to start with any calculation because even a relatively simple circuit like an amp is a hundred times more complex  than a circuit with a battery and a light bulb.

And if this “field-theory” describes more accurately the reality of what’s going on than for example Ohm’s law based on electrons  flowing through electronic parts and wires with resistance  should it not also give us the more accurate equations with which we could more accurately  calculate/select the parts for an amp? And should all of this not finally let us create better sounding amps? So, where are those better sounding amps today  based on this theory which is already know for quite a while (Maxwell, Tesla etc)? Do the HighEnd cables reflect this already based and built on solid knowledge or are they just a result of trial and error and we are kept busy finding some theory  (like this field-theory) for explaining what we hear and cannot explain?

These are real question, not to be misunderstood as cynical or sarcastic.

Any ideas or input? Did I miss something?