Earlier quoted context omitted.
noted.
I liked the video the was it was.
thanks!!
Visualizing Electricity
41–50 of 93 posts
Re: Visualizing Electricity
#42I’m not sure how this visualization is better than the hydrodynamic visualization, but it’s worse in one very important way - it uses “rotation” as a metaphor when angular momentum and spin are already very important. It would be hopelessly confusing to learn this metaphor (which has nothing to do with spin) and then try to disentangle it from your mental model when learning about spin later on.
I feel like the hydrogen atom model (the rendering model) is ambiguous, which makes the rotation ambiguous
Also, I feel like you have to have a good grasp of symmetry and rotation to grasp the thought that they rotating in different directions - the top part of the thing, closest to the viewer, is going right for both of them. Why is that counter or clockwise? Thank God I took quantum chemistry and think I know what they're going for.
Re: Visualizing Electricity
#43Re: Visualizing Electricity
#44I’m not sure how this visualization is better than the hydrodynamic visualization, but it’s worse in one very important way - it uses “rotation” as a metaphor when angular momentum and spin are already very important. It would be hopelessly confusing to learn this metaphor (which has nothing to do with spin) and then try to disentangle it from your mental model when learning about spin later on.
More importantly, I don't understand what this model is trying to conceptualize.
The hydrostatic analogy helps a person understand the difference between voltage and current. But its real power is it gives you the building blocks that lets you understand more complicated behaviors by analogy.
Take power in the P=I*V sense. Pretending it's water, we can see how a supersoaker nozzle (ie high voltage, low current) is kinda moving the same amount of water in a unit of time as say a soda bottle tipped on its side (ie low voltage, high current). With the hydrostatic analogy, I can see how high voltage and high current are two different "things", AND I can extend those analogies to see how they explain additional concepts like power. That's a great mental framework! Now that I understand the basic dynamics and feel comfortable moving into the land of mathematical expressions, we can take off the training wheels and start talking about the really abstract stuff like capacitance.
On the other hand, I'm not sure what is the explanatory power of this "meshing gears" analogy. If you were to use this to explain electricity in say a high school physics class, what concept or insight does it help me grasp?
Re: Visualizing Electricity
#45I used to use a gravitational field analogy when teaching Secondary school physics.
Electrons are equivalent to "balls" with mass. Potential difference equates to a gravitational field (which most people seem to intuitively understand from experience). Balls can roll down slopes of different gradients, and therefore at different speeds, which is analogous to current and resistance.
It worked for me.
Re: Visualizing Electricity
#46It's clear that a lot of work went in to this video and it's hard to hear criticism, especially of a labor of love. At the same time, I'd really like to see better analogies used for electricity, and that's going to require some very high quality work to replace the ones currently used.
The background music was quite bad and distracted a lot from the dialogue. (While I personally usually like the sound of bagpipes, most people seem to hate them, so that's an especially bad sound to use.) The background music is tonally too close to the speaker's voice, so the two together sound like the speaker is having to compete with the background music.
The constantly-shifting background and the nonstop fluctations of the hydrogen atom both also distracted from the core concept. Especially because the starry background kept changing direction!
The video uses vocabulary that isn't going to make intuitive sense to novices. Examples: "radial distribution function", "quantum jumping", "drift velocity", "multipolar contacts".
The clockwise-vs-counter-clockwise rotation thing never occupies the same frame in the video, so the watcher is expected to keep track of this mentally. Some people really struggle with that.
The advantage of other models of electricity is that they relate it to things that many people have experienced. This model is much more abstract. Abstract can be okay, but you should show reasons why the abstract model is better than the more relatable models. What's wrong with the other models? You say, "For example, it has some serious advantages over the traditional visualizations like the 'electron bead flow' and 'water-pressure analogy'", and you kind of describe one flaw of each of the two other models, but you don't describe why, in practical terms, this is problematic for understanding electricity. Like, okay, the Bohr model doesn't match the reality of probability clouds and quantum effects, but how does this impact simple circuits?
I found that the first half of Feynman's QED did a pretty good job of trying to explain quantum behavior in more abstract terms than the traditional approaches to light-as-wave-and-quanta. I'd also recommend looking at videos from 3blue1brown on YouTube for some ideas on how to present abstract concepts to viewers without breaking the bank on production.
Re: Visualizing Electricity
#47Honest feedback, this didn't really explain electricity for me. What is does is introduce an entirely new analogy for understanding electricity. Unfortunately, most elements of the new analogy are not relatable at all, meaning the analogy has no value. What do I care that the electrons "rotation" means charge and the speed means voltage? Why are they shaped like breathmints, how does that help if they are supposed to…
Yes, the main advantage over those models is that it uses atoms that are essentially shaped and moving as atoms do. Perhaps the gearbox of your car is a relatable phenomenon for you. The breath mints are shaped like gears lol.
Perhaps a better analogy is Newton's cradle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_cradle
The ticking beads don't really move but transfer energy to each other. That's maybe a more useful analogy than the notion of beads or water moving through some pipe.
I'm not a physicist of course but I get that what was explained to me in high school (many decades ago) was probably a bit of an oversimplification. Ticking beads lose some energy as they smash into each other. Hence thin wires heat up and glow.
This is probably cringe-worthy enough for anyone who actually studies this for a living; so I'll stop right there ;-)
Re: Visualizing Electricity
#48I’m not sure how this visualization is better than the hydrodynamic visualization, but it’s worse in one very important way - it uses “rotation” as a metaphor when angular momentum and spin are already very important. It would be hopelessly confusing to learn this metaphor (which has nothing to do with spin) and then try to disentangle it from your mental model when learning about spin later on.
I feel like the hydrogen atom model (the rendering model) is ambiguous, which makes the rotation ambiguous Also, I feel like you have to have a good grasp of symmetry and rotation to grasp the thought that they rotating in different directions - the top part of the thing, closest to the viewer, is going right for both of them. Why is that counter or clockwise? Thank God I took quantum chemistry and think I know what…
You have to view each terminal on its own terms: when viewed from above, each rotating atom at the end of each terminal is rotating oppositely (-/+ charge)...this means when you bring them together they coincide.
Re: Visualizing Electricity
#49I understand electricity reasonably well, but that video has left me very confused. Multiple watchings didn't help.
The first issue is I don't know what is real and what is metaphorical. The hydrogen orbitals are real? Are they squashed like that?. But the rotations are entirely fictional? Or do they correspond to electron spin? Do hydrogen atoms really share electron clouds or is that a metaphor?
Several specific issues: Ionized hydrogen doesn't have an electron, so what is the electron cloud. The ends of the wire rotating clockwise vs counterclockwise: the wires are pointing opposite directions, so the opposite directions cancel out, and they are rotating the same direction? Making a wire of single-file hydrogen: is that even theoretically possible? How is there drift velocity when the atoms are just rotating in place?
I understand that voltage is represented by the rotation speed in this model. (Is this different from momentum?) But what is current in this model? Everything was spinning when the circuit was open, and everything is still spinning when the circuit is closed.
What "level" of electricity is this model supposed to explain? It's discussing circuits, but I don't see how this model helps one understand why you need a resistor when connecting a LED to a battery, for instance. The resistor reduces current, which is not spin but propagation of an impulse? Or is the model supposed to help understand electric fields and stuff? (How would this model even explain an electric field in a vacuum, where there's nothing to spin?) Or is it intended to provide insight into what's happening at the quantum level?
I don't want to be critical, so hopefully these comments are constructive.
Re: Visualizing Electricity
#50I’m not sure how this visualization is better than the hydrodynamic visualization, but it’s worse in one very important way - it uses “rotation” as a metaphor when angular momentum and spin are already very important. It would be hopelessly confusing to learn this metaphor (which has nothing to do with spin) and then try to disentangle it from your mental model when learning about spin later on.
More importantly, I don't understand what this model is trying to conceptualize. The hydrostatic analogy helps a person understand the difference between voltage and current. But its real power is it gives you the building blocks that lets you understand more complicated behaviors by analogy. Take power in the P=I*V sense. Pretending it's water, we can see how a supersoaker nozzle (ie high voltage, low current) is ki…
"what does this help me grasp"
That electricity can be explained with atoms! And not the kind of bohr-model atoms that are thoroughly debunked (electron bead flying around nucleus magically). If we treat them like gearing shells, as chemists have for decades, we can provide a model of electricity that is consistent with quantum mathematical descriptions of the atom's shape and motion.