I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]

241–242 of 242 posts

Re: I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]

#241

Post by runarberg » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 2:11 AM UTC

kzrdude wrote: post #215

blondin wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry, veritasium is not / no longer the channel you think it is. they are not out to teach first. teaching became second at some point. making views became first and more important. it is totally understandable. (they talk about the team, paying people, etc.) i personally appreciate the honesty. the video they did around the subject should still be around.

They really managed to get a success this time: lots of views for this controversial video! But for me, it feels like a lot of credibility capital was spent. I was probably part of the core audience a few years ago.

For me Veritasium lost all his credibility capital by the way he responded to Tom Nicholas’ video about YouTube sponsorships using Veritasium as a case study[1]. In stead of approaching the debate calmly (or better yet, simply ignoring it) he came to the comment section way too defensive, like a lot, basically calling Tom a lair and a bad actor.

Actually that is not quite true, Veritasium lost a bunch of his credibility capital when he made the sponsored content for the self driving cars. I never watched that video as I spotted it was basically and ad and was reluctant to watch his new stuff after that (though I did).

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc

Re: I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]

#242

Post by smsm42 » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 12:32 AM UTC

junon wrote: post #229

JonathonW wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The further the battery and switch get away from the light, the less current you'll see at the battery at (sqrt(2)*width)/c s, since the electric and magnetic fields around the battery and wire will drop in strength as you move further away from them. Put another way, the main reason this effect is observable in the way shown in the video is because the light and battery, and the wires between them, are so close toge…

This makes more sense and was my first thought watching the video. Question: At which point does the influence reach actual zero? If it doesn't, does that mean the coffee in front of me is being influenced by Jupiter, however minuscule?

In field theory, IIRC, fields (absent special setups, i.e. in space) are never actual zero, but due to reverse square law they become too small to actually care about quite soon. But the quantum model may have some limitations on that, since stuff can't be arbitrarily small there AFAIK. Not sure what happens about the gravity - likely, Jupiter might influence your coffee, even though in an immeasurably small way, since gravity is very weak. We know the Moon influences our oceans quite prominently. But maybe there are minimums there too?

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