@@spacephysics6873It means that to bring a charge from a place Where is zero intensity ( That means the place where No electric field ). We know that equation of electric intensity is E=kq/r² So if E=0, Then kq ( Denominator) must be 0 but it's not possible. Then the other possibility is r=Infinity ( any number divided by Infinity is zero. Which can be proved using Limitation. So square of infinity must be zero). So Infinity is the point where no Intensity. Then we have to integrate the work done to bring that charge from infinity to r distance away from charge. So basically bringing from infinity means Bringing from a point having zero intensity or zero electrostatic force. To be honest, I took 3 days to arrive at this concept 🥵🥵🥵🥵
The minor “energy is the capacity to do work” and “work is the change in energy” inclusion is a nice touch, it’s insane to me that so many textbooks get away with such blatant circular reasoning!
Exactly, that's how it is for undergraduates. But it's pretty hard to explain that energy is the conserved quantity that you get from Lorentz Symmetries. Or that energy is momentum in the "time" direction.
The first isn't telling you what energy is, it's just describing a way of conceptualising it. The second isn't telling you what work is, it's just telling you how to measure it. Don't forget that the whole of physics is a man made invention. Energy and work are man made concepts.
@@svendkorsgaard9599 indeed, one of the most major things I’ve learnt in university is that many things are simpler and more elegant when you introduce (special) relativity into it! As you mentioned though, not exactly easy for high school students, so I do understand the compromises somewhat
@@StarsManny while they are man-made, the definitions shouldn’t be circular regardless (as doing so is bad theory-crafting). I do understand that the textbooks are just trying to make it more intuitive for beginners though
I'm an electrician and it even took me 5 years to figure out voltage. I think that's written in the textbook somewhere: "btw it will take you 5 years to figure this out"
Interesting. When I made this video, I wasn't sure if my experience was universal or not, but it seems a lot of people feel the same way. Looking back, I'm amazed I made it through my high school physics classes because I don't really think I knew what I was doing.
I am trying to think another way , considering voltage has mixed with two things, current and an electron. The current is Speed which moving electron faster, when we reduce the area then electron has not enough space to Move ,then electron passing more faster because creating pressure. Atoms have electron, proton, neutron and neutron, proton combined togather make neuclears and electron moving around the neuclears into the orbit according to atomic number , carbon has 6 atomic number it means 6 electron ,6 proton and 6 neutron K, L orbit has total 10 shell and electron are 6, in first orbit has two shells second orbit eight shells electron take the placed, now 4 shells is empty when we try to electricity to do work, using conductor to move electron one point to second point and conductor made with atoms , atoms has already electron whe we puting the extra electron then, create valence in this situation electron moving one shell to another shell in this way machine run.
I love it when eigenchris makes an April Fools' video, but it's really an existential ride through my life as a physics student and physicist. Keep up the good work man, and maybe one day, we will all understand voltage, momentum, spin, central charge, branes, clopen sets, natural transformations, etc., and then there will be peace.
why clopens sets, when do physicists need those? also they are realetively esy compaired to the rest since rthey are purely mathematical so they have a rigorous definition
@@ariebaudoin4824 It was a nod to his video about topology. And just because something has a rigorous definition, doesn't mean it's easy to understand.
@@orktv4673 true, what i ment was there is at least a guide on how to understand it, and it is never ambiguous, unlike consepts from physics. i didnt mean to sound condescending, sorry if i did
I have spent 3 nights awake in bed now trying to figure out a way of deriving certain properties of the electromagnetic field. I'm very sleepy as I write this comment. To taught oneself physics is often tough. It took me months 'hard work' to derive certain classical results from electromangetism and relativity, for which derivations are typically not found in the literature.
I am happy that you also visualize sometimes voltage (and potentials) as slopes. Electrons are the exercise junkies that always want to go up the hills.
Nope Electrons are also going from high to low energy. The might go from low potential, to high potential, but thats only, because their Energy is their charge, which is negative multiplied by the potential. This is how the electric potential is defined. Energy per charge.
Then you learn that the electric potential is just the first component of a 4-vector called the electromagnetic four-potential, which is analogous to the Christoffel symbols in the covariant derivative, but this time it is a gauge covariant derivative, and not in the tangent bundle of a pseudo-Riemannian manifold, but in something called a U(1) Lie-group valued fiber bundle over flat Minkowski spacetime? And it is somehow quantised and mediated by virtual photons? At this point, you realise that you don't really understand, what voltage is.
As I get older, learn more, and watch technology advance, I realize that the mental models I call "knowledge" are mostly crap, they match reality only in very narrow circumstances, and I really don't understand anything. By the time I am ready to die, I suspect I will finally accept that I truly know nothing, and that my journey on this earth has led me right back to the point I began. All of that philosophy wrapped up in one little video about voltage.
Electric potential is all that matters. Magnetic field is also relativistic transformation, because the electrons go so very fast (well, like me walking slowly )
As a biology student, this is the kind of things that has made me hate studying anything related to physics, maths and sometimes even chemistry. The teachers' universal inability to explain concepts in a simple manner, and then years later finding out on my own how simple those concepts always were, and that they could've explained it very clearly all along but chose not to.
You forget to account for the fact that you already had learned this stuff, so it was just a matter of time that it would make click. With the previous knowledge at your disposal, even though you didn`t appreciate it, thinking you knew nothing, when taking your time to actually understand it, you were able to do so. Don`t kid yourself into thinking that you would have understood this "simpler manner" you encountered much later in your life, if it was your frist introduction to the subject. You know how I know that? Because when I started tutoring middle school children at age 25, I realized that these "simple explanations" were in every school textbook I picked up and also in my old school notes from my teacher. I just didn`t appreciate it back then, like so many other students and had forgotten how much we had to learn as kids. And that was despite me being a Nerd who was into this kind of stuff. So I can understand that people who aren`t that much into it would take home even less. - Also a biologist.
@@maythesciencebewithyou No... not really. That's nothing like what I'm talking about. I NEVER understood basic concepts until very later on, because these basic concepts were never taught in a good way until I stumbled on a random UA-cam video or a random proper teacher. I put just as much effort if not less.
This video really hit me in the feels. If I've learned anything in my undergrad mathematics degree it's this. Sometimes the "easy" solution only becomes obvious once you've taken the long way around.
Yes. I've "taken the long way around" for a number of concepts, and only found the simpler explanation afterward. I have to wonder if the "long way around" was necessary for true understanding, or if I could have just learned it more quickly if someone told me.
@@eigenchris In my experience, the "simpler" explanation doesn't always click when helping classmates. They usually understand after giving a different perspective, or wording it in _just_ the right way.
I don’t remember the analogy of the slope being used in class but before I had to attend any class on electricity I remember that each science magazine I read used this analogy and it was indeed quite useful
This analogy was used in every one of my classes yet it took me more than two years for it to finally click... I wouldn't have needed to understand it to answer correctly, but it was nice to learn.
As a 25 year old, when I started tutoring middle school children, I realized that this slope thing was indeed in every school textbook, I just didn`t remember that it was.
3:02 holy crap that's such a good way of explaining voltage; I finally understand it now, and I'm 23, which means it took me... also 5 years since AP Physics 1 is when I first learned about voltage in my senior year lol.
To be more correct voltage is only defined for an electric field in a simply connected region where the curl is zero at every point. If thats not the case, voltage must be replaced by a piece of a closed line integral around a loop related to the partial derivative with respect to time of the magnetic flux across any suface that has that closed curve as a border. In practical aplications the change in the magnetuc flux is negligible or is lumped to a certain region and follows a simple linear rule that is used to define inductance.
Thanks for your suffering Being one of that million people to find your series useful, it indeed helps a lot It helps a lot in alleviating my own suffering (1st year MSc in Mathematical and Theoretical physics, I still don't know what momentum truly is)
i think definitions above don't do any justice, im still not super sure what momentum is but one way to think about it is essentially just way of measuring the relationship between the force and the time required to stop an object.
@@danielesemezie4436 Momentum is mass * velocity. And since the impulse is equal to momentum, and impulse is the integral of force with respect to time. This is why I said momentum is temporal force. The integral of force with respect to distance is work, which is equivalent to the change in kinetic energy, which is why I said energy is spatial force.
I can’t even begin to thank you enough for your content, these concepts that you explain in the most clear way any one has ever seen show a mastery on your part and are truly a great gift to everyone, thank you !
Let me do some brainsquishing reasoning : the potential is having some charges in a point of space , charges attract each other because they exert their forces in distance (field) mediated with photons?, the stronger attract the weaker so the thingies that have charge goes from the weak to strong, protons seems to not go free because they are binded with neutrons instead of electrons so yes electrons are attracted more than protons , explaining the real electric flow, but why it goes from positive to negative? I understood it like an analogy to temperature :/
My personal bit of horror was the explanation "Voltage is potential difference." ... between WHAT? What are the two things you're taking the difference between, and why are you only POTENTIALLY taking the difference between them? Why aren't you ALWAYS taking the difference? It was half a decade later that I learned they should have put an extra word in there. "Voltage is a difference in potential ENERGY (per unit charge)." It would have made things so much clearer, sooner.
Hey man, your suffering has meant a lot to me. Maybe a strange way to phrase it but apart from this video being hilarious and instantly shared with my electronics professor, all the content on this channel is amazing. And though i haven't been able to utilize it fully yet, I'm getting very close to the point where these videos will drastically set me apart from my peers when it comes time to take a test with tensors and shit. Straight up best explained hard topic I've ever and may ever encounter in my entire life. Just the tensor videos alone should revolutionize how that stuff's taught everywhere. Anyway, this has been my semi yearly appreciation post. Until next time, Bingus
Also holy shit my youtube was messing up and i didn't see any of the visuals, i just assumed it was voice over blank screen lmao. Video with video is even better
Thanks. The bit about me "suffering" is mostly a joke. I enjoy making math videos, otherwise I wouldn't make them. But it does make me a bit sad sometimes how long it takes me to understand certain things.
@@eigenchris Maybe it has to do with the order of things. Like for example, if school explained work = force × distance instead of the uninformative "change in energy," it would've made sense from the beginning. Well, an understanding of kinetic and potential energy too, though I think that's usually covered in high school physics, so I'm surprised to learn that some places don't cover that.
When I saw that the equation for gravitational potential energy was the same exact equation for electric potential energy, I knew this was a clue to understanding something I did not yet understand. I wrote the two equations down and kept them on a piece of paper at my desk. That was decades ago. But I still have this. I majored in literature but I do use batteries and sometimes I plug things into outlets and I begin to wonder about what is happening and I look at the equations and think about Einstein and Maxwell and quantum field theory.
This is relatable. I was confusing myself with what voltage and what is current. Every year I get to remember the old theory and learn just a little bit of new one. If there was no internet, this method of learning would have drove me insane, because of unasnwered questions and jumping from mechanics to thermodynamics to electrostatics. I just discovered this channel,thanks to that video, and It seems very interseting so I'll watch some of other videos later!
This hits too close to home...As someone who has suffered through the topics you usually cover at uni(and I'm not doing it again), your April fools videos is always such a treat!
Thanks for your suffering! Your content is unequaled on UA-cam, to go in that much mathematical depth with all those advanced topics. This is so useful for every theoretical physics student, and realistically also for people of higher academic rank.
As someone who doesn’t even understand the first thing about electrical engineering, the “why did it take you five years to understand voltage” thing really is applicable to the entire school system. The amount of analogies I had to come up with in high school just to understand something the teacher could’ve explained much easier is absurd (by that I mean one from memory, but still that’s more than zero). Education should be a whole lot more effective than what it is, and it’s agonising how much effort goes into learning fuck all at the end of the day
Hi Crhis. Your videos are great! I have been watching them since the tensor series. I had some knowledge of general relativity, and guess what? Your videos made me understand several concepts I had to just "swallow", Ricci tensor to give a quick example. Now you are on the spinors, which is also something I had to swallow, and I am very gratefull to you for deconstructing such a topic because it is extremely bad teached in every book and university course I have seen it. It is the story of the teenager that has spent a third of his life to understand something that should have been much easier. In fact, most people that theach those stuff don't have a clue about what they are speaking, they just repeat it. Again, thank you for your effort, your suffering is not in vain. At least you have releaved a big part of my suffering!
Thanks for your suffering. It’s channels like yours that reignited my passion for maths (and a special friend), that’s very important to me. I was losing my sense of self and on the verge of ending it all when I rediscovered the wonder and the thirst for understanding things I once had and was able to feel like myself again and think that maybe I have some utility in the world after all. So yes, I’m one person in a billion, but one person in a billion that you and others like you saved
this is one of the best comment sections i have ever seen. My man managed to turn everyone who ever studied physics into philosophers trying to find meaning in what they learned with one video
Hilarious. I understood Quantum Field Theory in less time than it took me to understand Maxwell's Equations. It boils down to mathematical maturity and sophistication. Thank you, eigenchris, for making eigenspaces a happier place to exist.
i didn’t learn voltage until i was 50… because i didn’t learn it from circuits… i learned it from maxwell equations, which requires one to understand what a gradient is… and so i had to learn nabla first and and vector calculus… then i learned what potential is … and then gravity potential as well… but this is a very hard way to understand voltage… but i found it rewarding.
This channel has helped me tremendously understand general relativity. This channel and Leonard susskins stanford lectures are the best things on UA-cam. I love the joke videos too
I still remember 6 years ago when i was in highschool crying(probably) because i was reading the same exact definitions and I didn't understand what energy and work were because of the same exact definitions they wrote that you put in your videos This video speaks to my soul
@@viliml2763 Usually, U is potential energy in general, while V is the potential energy divided by the participation property. In the case of electricity, that's charge. In the case of gravity, that's mass. From what I've learned, the reason why U is used for potential energy, is that the letter U looks like a potential energy vs position graph, of a particle in stable equilibrium. The letters U and V have had a historical origin where they once were the same letter in the original Latin script, and now have become two separate letters. This letter used to have a duality of pronunciation like Y, where in a consonant's position it would sound like V, and in a vowel's position it would sound like U. It's a fortuitous coincidence that Volta's name starts with the same letter as U's alphabet neighbor, so that it can refer to electric potential (i.e. voltage), and force field potential in general (e.g. gravitational potential).
As a 18 yo student in Spain I must say that at when I was 17 in that same situation I compared it to gravitational fields and it just made sense. It took me like 3 years also to understand what voltage really is and the problem I think is that teachers suppose that you already know it cause they do know and don't even bother explaining it conceptually. Anyways nice video.
@@memekun1040 Well, my thought process was something like this: As in gravitational field we have mass, the equivalent in electrostatic field is the charge, measured in kg and Coulombs respectively. Thus, when a charged particle exists, it generates potential in it's surroundings, it may be negative or positive but the concept its analogous to a particle that has mass and also creates like a curve in the space itself, displaying gravitational potential just like before. In gravitational field we have variation in potential energy and can be seen for example when an asteroid approaches the Earth and accelerates on it's way down, transforming potential energy into kinetic energy. The comparation in electrical field is as easy as a positive and negative charge attracting each other: the negative charge seek increasing potentials that are generated by the positive charge and vice versa. I see them very similar in terms of energy transfer between the objects and the field. Other thing very different its the magnetic field that isn't conservative and it varies with time.
You're not only a great teacher but also great at story telling. Could totally relate. Also nice drawings. That stick figure is adorable for some reason lol. Have your friends told you to become a movie director?😁 Thanks for the laughs and all your work
Simple words: more is the voltage more is the speed of the electrons in the circuit. Voltage is the pressure given by a cell or a battery to a electron to move.
I dont know why but this video kept pushed onto me several times. Finally after being sicc of the thumbnail, i decided to give it a watch. Im thankful for that.
How to get your BS in Engineering 1. Find the equation. use it. 2. Sometimes the equation works. Sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't work go backwards and figure out how you used it wrong. 3. At no point do you ever attempt to understand where these numbers come from. That is for nerds.
My current understanding (at 18): Higher potential difference = a space where a charge gets accelerated through more quickly..? Larger differences like pressure gradients in a vacuum chamber if cracked would make the air go really quick, I imagine voltage to be like that idk
For anyone who's really wondering: You can imagine voltage as the pressure that pumps water through a pipe, except it pumps electrons through metal. Or a cartoon character, kicking in the ass of another one so hard, they fly out of the window. That's voltage!
@@samarkand1585 I think you can imagine it as a form of intensity. The formular sign for voltage 'U' stands for 'Urge' meaning how aroused the electrons are to move. The force with wich they really move through a conductor is also dependant on the material, this is the resistence 'R'. The impact of the electrons on the conductor is the current 'I' and this is what kills you when it's too high. I really hope I'm not telling too much crap here, I know it can be a rather complicated matter to understand.
Water analogy is what i use mostly. Voltage is difference in pressure, electrical current is the water flow and resistance is tube making friction. Smoother and bigger the tube, less friction, more water flowing. Higher the pressure, faster the flow.
I was taught that the voltage is a difference of potentials (with the slope analogy), in a regular physics class when 14 years old I can't believe that this is how it's explained in your schools
Holy shit this is so accurate it's almost scary. I'm taking Intro to Circuits this semester, and voltage finally clicked for me in the exact same way, with all the same thoughts of "why did it take this long" lmao. Literally the only difference is that for me the realization came while taking the midterm, not the final!
Now I feel like any encouragement and gratitude I give you is simultaneously encouraging you to ditch your friendships for a random's text on your computer screen😅 but keep up the great work, you're doing a great thing! You're deadpan, no frills takes allow a high rate of insight and knowledge integration! Just don't forget to also find love and companionship on the side when you can squeeze it in! 😂
Can confirm. This was my exact experience too. I was midway through EE before I finally understood Ohms Law intuitively. In one of my clinical instrumentation classes, the prof asked us to brainstorm analogies for different circuit components. When he said capacitor, I said spring. He said no because that’s more like a resistor. I guess some people go their whole lives without really understanding this intuitively.
Interesting. I was saying in another comment that I'm not sure how I passed high school physics. I'm sure I did plenty of Ohm's Law problems over the years, but somehow I didn't really "get" it until my 2nd year of university. I'm not sure how that happened. (hence this video).
Mathematically speaking as well you're correct. In LC circuits (where the capacitors are charged and then connected to an inductor, resulting in oscillation of the charge though the system), one can compare the differential equation (q" +ω²q =0) it forms with the differential equation from a spring block system (x" +ω²x = 0) You can see how 1/LC behaves like k/m. This shows that the capacitor sort of acts like a spring and the inductor acts like the mass.
@@bmuhammadthariqhumaid4670 an LRC circuit behaves very much like a sprung mass because they are both oscillators (one electrical, one mechanical). In fact, when you solve for the equation that describe each's behaviour, the equations are almost identical except the spring constant k in the sprung mass equation is replaced by the capacitance C in the RLC circuit equation. Back in the days of analog computers, they'd exploit this fact to model real systems using circuit components. Want to optimize the suspension settings for a new car design? Choose the right capacitance and inductance to model the spring strength and car mass (respectively), run the circuit and trace the output voltage to show how bumpy the ride will be.
My guy here is way too underrated bro. This video right here is peak comedy. And the amount of videos he's posted, i really believe he deserves way more views and subs
Short answer: it is a measure of the disorder of a system. Long answer: you need calculus to quantitatively define entropy, and statistics to fully understand what it is at a molecular level. Entropy is a thermodynamic property of a system, that can be transferred with heat entering and exiting the system. As we track every infinitesimal unit of heat (dQ), we associate it with a corresponding Kelvin temperature T at which it transfers. The cumulative value of dQ/T for a given heat flow, will determine the entropy transfer associated with that heat flow.
I'm a mechanical engineer. My father was an electrical engineer. My father tried to teach me about electricity and circuitry, but since it all made sense to him, he couldn't explain it to me. It wasn't until I took physics 201 and basic electrical circuits in college that I finally understood what voltage was. However, being an engineer who mostly studied fluids, I like the 'garden hose analogy', where voltage is akin to water pressure......
Hi, a Hongkonger here. I only learnt about voltage when I was 16 years old. My teachers just teach the way you learnt at 19 years old to me: positive charge wants to go from high potential to low potential. I am now 25 years old and I still remember and understand.
As an Indian, I'm glad to say that the physics material for high school is quite richly explained on UA-cam by various teachers, and so I had understood work and energy and potential to an intuitive point. It just feels sad that all of those lectures are in Hindi and hence inaccessible to the rest of the world.
The whole idea of "relative to infinity" can be kind of confusing. Here's the way I recommend thinking about it. Consider how for indefinite integrals, we always have to add that +C term. Why not just keep it simple, and let C equal zero? You'll ultimately subtract them anyway, for the application of definite integrals, so what's the point of the +C? There are applications where C isn't equal to zero, but they aren't where I'm intending to go with this. It turns out, that the reference position of infinitely far away, is just a consequence of letting +C = 0, when we calculate electric potential from an electric field. It's an arbitrary reference point, that keeps the math simple, when integrating a function that starts as 1/r^2, and turning it into 1/r + C after integrating. That's why we do it this way, since 1/r will equal zero, when r is infinite.
My high school chemistry teacher would tell us that that we would be ready for our tests and really understood something if we could go home and teach it to our parents.
It took me ages to understand voltage. And charge as well. Here are the stages I went through: 1. Electrons move through a wire from a battery to a lightbulb. The lightbulb turns the electrons into light. AC isn't a thing. 2. Electrons carry charge through a wire. Charge is the same thing as electrical energy. The electrons deliver charge to the lightbulb, which it converts into light, but the electrons themselves are not consumed. AC still doesn't exist. (2.1 - Breakthrough) I discovered Newton's equation for gravity, G = Mm/r^2. I wondered if there was an equivalent formula for the electromagnetic force. I wondered what the equivalent of mass for the electromagnetic force would be. I conjectured that it would be charge, and that charge is therefore to the electromagnetic force what mass is to gravity. I looked up Coulomb's formula and realised I was right. Eureka! So particles with more charge are more strongly influenced by the electromagnetic force and charge is also an inalienable property of particles that does not change at the subatomic level (if we ignore relativity). 3. Charge is a property of electrons. Electrical energy is not the same thing as charge. The formula Volts = Joules/ Coulombs now makes sense, as I know the difference between a Joule and a Coulomb. The movement of electrons produces an electromagnetic field that carries the energy, and the electrons do not need to move from the battery to the lightbulb to carry energy to it. I now also understand AC.
This was my experience with calculus. I didn’t take calc in school so had to take it at university. The way I phrase it to friends is that it seemed to me my education waited until college to tell me the punchline to the joke. In other words, all my mathematical studies up through college did not express to me any real “why” that had meaning to me. Then, calculus was like “so how do we know the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the radius?” and I was blown away. All the many years of estimating in increasingly accurate but laborious ways the area of a circle solved by the calculus of infinitesimals. Woah.
I tend to struggle and take my time getting to know fundamental concepts such as voltage, because understanding basics makes a strong foundation that lets me solve very complex problems down the road. Currently with voltage, I know what it is, but I still feel like I can’t grasp it intuitively. Glad to know I’m not the only one.
i had this exact thought… spent hours on it yet still incapable of understanding in detail it since it’s all just definitions within definitions, with different ways of interpreting those definitions…. i wondered what the point of a definition is if it can’t even accurately and fully define what i want to know. Teachers in school just say “memorise formula” I may be a fool, trying to actually understand it in depth and lacking behind hence…
The most accurate part of this is finally understanding an extremely basic concept during a final exam
Fear quikens
"you will remember this next time you are bringing a Coulomb from infinity" had me laughing
do you not regularly bring coulombs from infinity?
All those trips to infinity to get yet another resistor for my circuit are draining me of energy! Perhaps I need more coulombs.
I thought the same thing too 😂😂
Why we bring coulomb from infinity 😢?
@@spacephysics6873It means that to bring a charge from a place Where is zero intensity ( That means the place where No electric field ).
We know that equation of electric intensity is E=kq/r²
So if E=0, Then kq ( Denominator) must be 0 but it's not possible. Then the other possibility is r=Infinity ( any number divided by Infinity is zero. Which can be proved using Limitation. So square of infinity must be zero). So Infinity is the point where no Intensity. Then we have to integrate the work done to bring that charge from infinity to r distance away from charge.
So basically bringing from infinity means Bringing from a point having zero intensity or zero electrostatic force.
To be honest, I took 3 days to arrive at this concept 🥵🥵🥵🥵
The minor “energy is the capacity to do work” and “work is the change in energy” inclusion is a nice touch, it’s insane to me that so many textbooks get away with such blatant circular reasoning!
Because science also have axyoms, but pretend not to
Exactly, that's how it is for undergraduates. But it's pretty hard to explain that energy is the conserved quantity that you get from Lorentz Symmetries. Or that energy is momentum in the "time" direction.
The first isn't telling you what energy is, it's just describing a way of conceptualising it. The second isn't telling you what work is, it's just telling you how to measure it.
Don't forget that the whole of physics is a man made invention. Energy and work are man made concepts.
@@svendkorsgaard9599 indeed, one of the most major things I’ve learnt in university is that many things are simpler and more elegant when you introduce (special) relativity into it!
As you mentioned though, not exactly easy for high school students, so I do understand the compromises somewhat
@@StarsManny while they are man-made, the definitions shouldn’t be circular regardless (as doing so is bad theory-crafting).
I do understand that the textbooks are just trying to make it more intuitive for beginners though
No way it's April fools' man. Way too real. Hit right in the feels.
My thoughts, precisely.
AK I was going to write something along the same lines. The modern human condition.
ikr.. which part isn't real?
Exactly
I'm an electrician and it even took me 5 years to figure out voltage. I think that's written in the textbook somewhere: "btw it will take you 5 years to figure this out"
Interesting. When I made this video, I wasn't sure if my experience was universal or not, but it seems a lot of people feel the same way. Looking back, I'm amazed I made it through my high school physics classes because I don't really think I knew what I was doing.
You are not alone.I’m a fourth year electrical engineering student,and to this day I’m still trying to understand what REALLY is voltage.
@@eigenchris same, just figured it out few month ago, I'm on my second semester in university
@@eigenchris okay, guys, next question. what is amperage?
I am trying to think another way , considering voltage has mixed with two things, current and an electron.
The current is Speed which moving electron faster, when we reduce the area then electron has not enough space to Move ,then electron passing more faster because creating pressure.
Atoms have electron, proton, neutron and neutron, proton combined togather make neuclears and electron moving around the neuclears into the orbit according to atomic number , carbon has 6 atomic number it means 6 electron ,6 proton and 6 neutron K, L orbit has total 10 shell and electron are 6, in first orbit has two shells second orbit eight shells electron take the placed, now 4 shells is empty when we try to electricity to do work, using conductor to move electron one point to second point and conductor made with atoms , atoms has already electron whe we puting the extra electron then, create valence in this situation electron moving one shell to another shell in this way machine run.
I love it when eigenchris makes an April Fools' video, but it's really an existential ride through my life as a physics student and physicist. Keep up the good work man, and maybe one day, we will all understand voltage, momentum, spin, central charge, branes, clopen sets, natural transformations, etc., and then there will be peace.
why clopens sets, when do physicists need those? also they are realetively esy compaired to the rest since rthey are purely mathematical so they have a rigorous definition
@@ariebaudoin4824 It was a nod to his video about topology. And just because something has a rigorous definition, doesn't mean it's easy to understand.
@@orktv4673 true, what i ment was there is at least a guide on how to understand it, and it is never ambiguous, unlike consepts from physics.
i didnt mean to sound condescending, sorry if i did
I have spent 3 nights awake in bed now trying to figure out a way of deriving certain properties of the electromagnetic field. I'm very sleepy as I write this comment.
To taught oneself physics is often tough. It took me months 'hard work' to derive certain classical results from electromangetism and relativity, for which derivations are typically not found in the literature.
amen
I am happy that you also visualize sometimes voltage (and potentials) as slopes.
Electrons are the exercise junkies that always want to go up the hills.
That's a funny way of putting it. I'll have to remember that.
Then you could make a “Harry Spotter” or “Lord of the Gyms” type video with electrons right? 😂
This is the very definition of a "potential" 😢
Even their jumping is enough to ruin most of students' lives
Nope
Electrons are also going from high to low energy.
The might go from low potential, to high potential, but thats only, because their Energy is their charge, which is negative multiplied by the potential. This is how the electric potential is defined. Energy per charge.
Then you learn that the electric potential is just the first component of a 4-vector called the electromagnetic four-potential, which is analogous to the Christoffel symbols in the covariant derivative, but this time it is a gauge covariant derivative, and not in the tangent bundle of a pseudo-Riemannian manifold, but in something called a U(1) Lie-group valued fiber bundle over flat Minkowski spacetime? And it is somehow quantised and mediated by virtual photons? At this point, you realise that you don't really understand, what voltage is.
I feel like I understand less and less the more I dive into higher topics.
As I get older, learn more, and watch technology advance, I realize that the mental models I call "knowledge" are mostly crap, they match reality only in very narrow circumstances, and I really don't understand anything. By the time I am ready to die, I suspect I will finally accept that I truly know nothing, and that my journey on this earth has led me right back to the point I began. All of that philosophy wrapped up in one little video about voltage.
Profiles of the reality.
My education will be fulfilled the day when I understand this comment fully.
Electric potential is all that matters. Magnetic field is also relativistic transformation, because the electrons go so very fast (well, like me walking slowly )
As a biology student, this is the kind of things that has made me hate studying anything related to physics, maths and sometimes even chemistry. The teachers' universal inability to explain concepts in a simple manner, and then years later finding out on my own how simple those concepts always were, and that they could've explained it very clearly all along but chose not to.
👌👌👍👍
Also when they act like youre the stupid one...
@@dawaeleader5771 Oh boy , where are you from?
You forget to account for the fact that you already had learned this stuff, so it was just a matter of time that it would make click. With the previous knowledge at your disposal, even though you didn`t appreciate it, thinking you knew nothing, when taking your time to actually understand it, you were able to do so. Don`t kid yourself into thinking that you would have understood this "simpler manner" you encountered much later in your life, if it was your frist introduction to the subject.
You know how I know that? Because when I started tutoring middle school children at age 25, I realized that these "simple explanations" were in every school textbook I picked up and also in my old school notes from my teacher. I just didn`t appreciate it back then, like so many other students and had forgotten how much we had to learn as kids. And that was despite me being a Nerd who was into this kind of stuff. So I can understand that people who aren`t that much into it would take home even less. - Also a biologist.
@@maythesciencebewithyou No... not really. That's nothing like what I'm talking about. I NEVER understood basic concepts until very later on, because these basic concepts were never taught in a good way until I stumbled on a random UA-cam video or a random proper teacher. I put just as much effort if not less.
This video really hit me in the feels. If I've learned anything in my undergrad mathematics degree it's this. Sometimes the "easy" solution only becomes obvious once you've taken the long way around.
Yes. I've "taken the long way around" for a number of concepts, and only found the simpler explanation afterward. I have to wonder if the "long way around" was necessary for true understanding, or if I could have just learned it more quickly if someone told me.
@@eigenchris In my experience, the "simpler" explanation doesn't always click when helping classmates.
They usually understand after giving a different perspective, or wording it in _just_ the right way.
I don’t remember the analogy of the slope being used in class but before I had to attend any class on electricity I remember that each science magazine I read used this analogy and it was indeed quite useful
This analogy was used in every one of my classes yet it took me more than two years for it to finally click... I wouldn't have needed to understand it to answer correctly, but it was nice to learn.
If you previously understood what potential energy meant, from a more basic physics lesson, then it should already be easy enough.
@@stevenfallinge7149 that's the thing, I understood how to use Potential Energy, but didn't understand what it really means until much later in life.
As a 25 year old, when I started tutoring middle school children, I realized that this slope thing was indeed in every school textbook, I just didn`t remember that it was.
3:02 holy crap that's such a good way of explaining voltage; I finally understand it now, and I'm 23, which means it took me... also 5 years since AP Physics 1 is when I first learned about voltage in my senior year lol.
The prophecy is fulfilled!
@@eigenchris rofl
To be more correct voltage is only defined for an electric field in a simply connected region where the curl is zero at every point. If thats not the case, voltage must be replaced by a piece of a closed line integral around a loop related to the partial derivative with respect to time of the magnetic flux across any suface that has that closed curve as a border. In practical aplications the change in the magnetuc flux is negligible or is lumped to a certain region and follows a simple linear rule that is used to define inductance.
Thanks for your suffering
Being one of that million people to find your series useful, it indeed helps a lot
It helps a lot in alleviating my own suffering
(1st year MSc in Mathematical and Theoretical physics, I still don't know what momentum truly is)
Because you have to experience it .
Where did you see a football player becoming a football player by reading books ?
I advise you to watch dan pena
momentum is temporal force, and energy is spatial force
I saw a ball in front of me. It was getting larger. I couldn't figure it out. Then it hit me.
i think definitions above don't do any justice, im still not super sure what momentum is but one way to think about it is essentially just way of measuring the relationship between the force and the time required to stop an object.
@@danielesemezie4436 Momentum is mass * velocity. And since the impulse is equal to momentum, and impulse is the integral of force with respect to time. This is why I said momentum is temporal force.
The integral of force with respect to distance is work, which is equivalent to the change in kinetic energy, which is why I said energy is spatial force.
I can’t even begin to thank you enough for your content, these concepts that you explain in the most clear way any one has ever seen show a mastery on your part and are truly a great gift to everyone, thank you !
As a 21 year old engineering student, I still barely understand voltage…
Let me do some brainsquishing reasoning : the potential is having some charges in a point of space , charges attract each other because they exert their forces in distance (field) mediated with photons?, the stronger attract the weaker so the thingies that have charge goes from the weak to strong, protons seems to not go free because they are binded with neutrons instead of electrons so yes electrons are attracted more than protons , explaining the real electric flow, but why it goes from positive to negative? I understood it like an analogy to temperature :/
idk, i got introduced to the water analogy from the get go. voltage is height, current is amount of water, resistance is the obstacles in pipes
Or the pipe itself.
My personal bit of horror was the explanation "Voltage is potential difference." ... between WHAT? What are the two things you're taking the difference between, and why are you only POTENTIALLY taking the difference between them? Why aren't you ALWAYS taking the difference?
It was half a decade later that I learned they should have put an extra word in there. "Voltage is a difference in potential ENERGY (per unit charge)." It would have made things so much clearer, sooner.
The age of the man it’s named after
Hey man, your suffering has meant a lot to me. Maybe a strange way to phrase it but apart from this video being hilarious and instantly shared with my electronics professor, all the content on this channel is amazing. And though i haven't been able to utilize it fully yet, I'm getting very close to the point where these videos will drastically set me apart from my peers when it comes time to take a test with tensors and shit.
Straight up best explained hard topic I've ever and may ever encounter in my entire life. Just the tensor videos alone should revolutionize how that stuff's taught everywhere.
Anyway, this has been my semi yearly appreciation post. Until next time,
Bingus
Also holy shit my youtube was messing up and i didn't see any of the visuals, i just assumed it was voice over blank screen lmao. Video with video is even better
Thanks. The bit about me "suffering" is mostly a joke. I enjoy making math videos, otherwise I wouldn't make them. But it does make me a bit sad sometimes how long it takes me to understand certain things.
@@eigenchris Maybe it has to do with the order of things. Like for example, if school explained work = force × distance instead of the uninformative "change in energy," it would've made sense from the beginning. Well, an understanding of kinetic and potential energy too, though I think that's usually covered in high school physics, so I'm surprised to learn that some places don't cover that.
1:30 this made me smile way too hard
When I saw that the equation for gravitational potential energy was the same exact equation for electric potential energy, I knew this was a clue to understanding something I did not yet understand. I wrote the two equations down and kept them on a piece of paper at my desk. That was decades ago. But I still have this. I majored in literature but I do use batteries and sometimes I plug things into outlets and I begin to wonder about what is happening and I look at the equations and think about Einstein and Maxwell and quantum field theory.
This is no joke. Electrostatics' definitions are also confusing just as electricity
i’ve been waiting for this video for a week now. these are the best!
I've been waiting five years :/
Voltage is a concept that I cannot define but completely surrounds my line of work
5:40 But to be fair, one in every million people means about 8,000 people in total which is a decent amount. (EDIT: Fixed an error in calculation.)
Uh.... When did we end up with 8 trillion people on earth?
@@throx Oops, I'll edit my comment.
So that's why it's called potential difference.
As eye opening, life changing, mind boggling as Intro to Tensor Calculus was, this will always be my favorite Eigenchris series.
This is relatable. I was confusing myself with what voltage and what is current. Every year I get to remember the old theory and learn just a little bit of new one. If there was no internet, this method of learning would have drove me insane, because of unasnwered questions and jumping from mechanics to thermodynamics to electrostatics. I just discovered this channel,thanks to that video, and It seems very interseting so I'll watch some of other videos later!
haha i just gave up in school and focused on chemistry- but videos are good ways to learn for fun
Why is the timeline so relatable... Went from AP Physics when I was 17 to 19 taking an open book exam in college.
This is brilliant. As someone going through the suffering that is an electronics and electrodynamics course, this brought a great smile to my face
This hits too close to home...As someone who has suffered through the topics you usually cover at uni(and I'm not doing it again), your April fools videos is always such a treat!
Thanks for your suffering! Your content is unequaled on UA-cam, to go in that much mathematical depth with all those advanced topics. This is so useful for every theoretical physics student, and realistically also for people of higher academic rank.
Don't worry, we all appreciate your work here very much and hope you continue doing it. Happy April Fools to you too
Where this channel has been my whole life 🥲
As someone who doesn’t even understand the first thing about electrical engineering, the “why did it take you five years to understand voltage” thing really is applicable to the entire school system. The amount of analogies I had to come up with in high school just to understand something the teacher could’ve explained much easier is absurd (by that I mean one from memory, but still that’s more than zero). Education should be a whole lot more effective than what it is, and it’s agonising how much effort goes into learning fuck all at the end of the day
Definition of Potential :
What electrons have and I don't.
Hi Crhis. Your videos are great! I have been watching them since the tensor series. I had some knowledge of general relativity, and guess what? Your videos made me understand several concepts I had to just "swallow", Ricci tensor to give a quick example. Now you are on the spinors, which is also something I had to swallow, and I am very gratefull to you for deconstructing such a topic because it is extremely bad teached in every book and university course I have seen it. It is the story of the teenager that has spent a third of his life to understand something that should have been much easier. In fact, most people that theach those stuff don't have a clue about what they are speaking, they just repeat it. Again, thank you for your effort, your suffering is not in vain. At least you have releaved a big part of my suffering!
Thanks for your suffering. It’s channels like yours that reignited my passion for maths (and a special friend), that’s very important to me. I was losing my sense of self and on the verge of ending it all when I rediscovered the wonder and the thirst for understanding things I once had and was able to feel like myself again and think that maybe I have some utility in the world after all. So yes, I’m one person in a billion, but one person in a billion that you and others like you saved
this is one of the best comment sections i have ever seen. My man managed to turn everyone who ever studied physics into philosophers trying to find meaning in what they learned with one video
ive always complained about my teacher bc he is a bit unconvensional and gives low grades , but damn he made us understand voltage in 50 minutes
Hilarious. I understood Quantum Field Theory in less time than it took me to understand Maxwell's Equations. It boils down to mathematical maturity and sophistication. Thank you, eigenchris, for making eigenspaces a happier place to exist.
in my textbook it was said that work is done when a force displaces an object in the direction of the force, so work was force x displacement, or W=Fs
i didn’t learn voltage until i was 50… because i didn’t learn it from circuits… i learned it from maxwell equations, which requires one to understand what a gradient is… and so i had to learn nabla first and and vector calculus… then i learned what potential is … and then gravity potential as well… but this is a very hard way to understand voltage… but i found it rewarding.
This channel has helped me tremendously understand general relativity. This channel and Leonard susskins stanford lectures are the best things on UA-cam. I love the joke videos too
I still remember 6 years ago when i was in highschool crying(probably) because i was reading the same exact definitions and I didn't understand what energy and work were because of the same exact definitions they wrote that you put in your videos
This video speaks to my soul
Bro went to Harvard and studied how to draw stick figures
why are they soooo good
I am 18 and been doing physics for more than 5 years and this video clicked the voltage for me.
TIL that apparently my High School physics teacher was just cracked at teaching stuff correctly and understandably
Basically, if you know that gravitational potential is V and voltage is V and that this is not a coincidence, you understand voltage.
but voltage is U...
@@viliml2763 Usually, U is potential energy in general, while V is the potential energy divided by the participation property. In the case of electricity, that's charge. In the case of gravity, that's mass.
From what I've learned, the reason why U is used for potential energy, is that the letter U looks like a potential energy vs position graph, of a particle in stable equilibrium. The letters U and V have had a historical origin where they once were the same letter in the original Latin script, and now have become two separate letters. This letter used to have a duality of pronunciation like Y, where in a consonant's position it would sound like V, and in a vowel's position it would sound like U.
It's a fortuitous coincidence that Volta's name starts with the same letter as U's alphabet neighbor, so that it can refer to electric potential (i.e. voltage), and force field potential in general (e.g. gravitational potential).
Exactly why I believe that it should be taught as POTENTIAL DIFFERENCE from the start
As a 18 yo student in Spain I must say that at when I was 17 in that same situation I compared it to gravitational fields and it just made sense. It took me like 3 years also to understand what voltage really is and the problem I think is that teachers suppose that you already know it cause they do know and don't even bother explaining it conceptually. Anyways nice video.
How did you relate it to gravity?
@@memekun1040 Well, my thought process was something like this:
As in gravitational field we have mass, the equivalent in electrostatic field is the charge, measured in kg and Coulombs respectively. Thus, when a charged particle exists, it generates potential in it's surroundings, it may be negative or positive but the concept its analogous to a particle that has mass and also creates like a curve in the space itself, displaying gravitational potential just like before. In gravitational field we have variation in potential energy and can be seen for example when an asteroid approaches the Earth and accelerates on it's way down, transforming potential energy into kinetic energy. The comparation in electrical field is as easy as a positive and negative charge attracting each other: the negative charge seek increasing potentials that are generated by the positive charge and vice versa.
I see them very similar in terms of energy transfer between the objects and the field. Other thing very different its the magnetic field that isn't conservative and it varies with time.
A refreshing change from the norm, excellent show Chris !
Idk what i love more, your joke videos or your serious ones XD
Missed opportunity to title the video "Watt is a Voltage?"
You're not only a great teacher but also great at story telling. Could totally relate. Also nice drawings. That stick figure is adorable for some reason lol.
Have your friends told you to become a movie director?😁
Thanks for the laughs and all your work
Simple words: more is the voltage more is the speed of the electrons in the circuit. Voltage is the pressure given by a cell or a battery to a electron to move.
i absolutely love your april fools videos, you should do more humoristic videos if you feel like it, cause you're really good at it
I dont know why but this video kept pushed onto me several times. Finally after being sicc of the thumbnail, i decided to give it a watch. Im thankful for that.
If I succeeded in theoretical physics, credit goes to you.
How to get your BS in Engineering
1. Find the equation. use it.
2. Sometimes the equation works. Sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't work go backwards and figure out how you used it wrong.
3. At no point do you ever attempt to understand where these numbers come from. That is for nerds.
Zamn
Making those for every april's fool day
Truly legend
My current understanding (at 18): Higher potential difference = a space where a charge gets accelerated through more quickly..? Larger differences like pressure gradients in a vacuum chamber if cracked would make the air go really quick, I imagine voltage to be like that idk
Yeah. The slope (or "gradient") of voltage is proportional to the force, and thus proportional to acceleration.
For anyone who's really wondering: You can imagine voltage as the pressure that pumps water through a pipe, except it pumps electrons through metal. Or a cartoon character, kicking in the ass of another one so hard, they fly out of the window. That's voltage!
So what, the electrons just go through the pipe faster? So more of them can go through at a given time? What's the difference with intensity then?
@@samarkand1585 I think you can imagine it as a form of intensity. The formular sign for voltage 'U' stands for 'Urge' meaning how aroused the electrons are to move. The force with wich they really move through a conductor is also dependant on the material, this is the resistence 'R'. The impact of the electrons on the conductor is the current 'I' and this is what kills you when it's too high.
I really hope I'm not telling too much crap here, I know it can be a rather complicated matter to understand.
Water analogy is what i use mostly. Voltage is difference in pressure, electrical current is the water flow and resistance is tube making friction. Smoother and bigger the tube, less friction, more water flowing. Higher the pressure, faster the flow.
Wait until that guy hears about electrons passing through potential barrier higher than their own energy... but only sometimes!
3:49 at this moment I start crying
I was taught that the voltage is a difference of potentials (with the slope analogy), in a regular physics class when 14 years old
I can't believe that this is how it's explained in your schools
It amazes me to know how well the creator understands physics !!
This is top-tier content!!
Holy shit this is so accurate it's almost scary. I'm taking Intro to Circuits this semester, and voltage finally clicked for me in the exact same way, with all the same thoughts of "why did it take this long" lmao. Literally the only difference is that for me the realization came while taking the midterm, not the final!
5:16 it would be 1827.25 days. Potentially 1828.25
😂"potentially"
Now I feel like any encouragement and gratitude I give you is simultaneously encouraging you to ditch your friendships for a random's text on your computer screen😅 but keep up the great work, you're doing a great thing! You're deadpan, no frills takes allow a high rate of insight and knowledge integration! Just don't forget to also find love and companionship on the side when you can squeeze it in! 😂
Can confirm. This was my exact experience too. I was midway through EE before I finally understood Ohms Law intuitively.
In one of my clinical instrumentation classes, the prof asked us to brainstorm analogies for different circuit components. When he said capacitor, I said spring. He said no because that’s more like a resistor. I guess some people go their whole lives without really understanding this intuitively.
Interesting. I was saying in another comment that I'm not sure how I passed high school physics. I'm sure I did plenty of Ohm's Law problems over the years, but somehow I didn't really "get" it until my 2nd year of university. I'm not sure how that happened. (hence this video).
I aced all tests without studying, and any time a professor tried to use an analogy to 'teach something,' I stated only idiots use analogies.
Mathematically speaking as well you're correct. In LC circuits (where the capacitors are charged and then connected to an inductor, resulting in oscillation of the charge though the system), one can compare the differential equation (q" +ω²q =0) it forms with the differential equation from a spring block system (x" +ω²x = 0)
You can see how 1/LC behaves like k/m. This shows that the capacitor sort of acts like a spring and the inductor acts like the mass.
how is capacitor is like spring? can you explain?
@@bmuhammadthariqhumaid4670 an LRC circuit behaves very much like a sprung mass because they are both oscillators (one electrical, one mechanical). In fact, when you solve for the equation that describe each's behaviour, the equations are almost identical except the spring constant k in the sprung mass equation is replaced by the capacitance C in the RLC circuit equation.
Back in the days of analog computers, they'd exploit this fact to model real systems using circuit components. Want to optimize the suspension settings for a new car design? Choose the right capacitance and inductance to model the spring strength and car mass (respectively), run the circuit and trace the output voltage to show how bumpy the ride will be.
Very funny, thanks. Which software do you use?
Microsoft Powerpoint.
@@eigenchrisCool, I thought so. The other momentum video was also quite relatable, keep up the good work.
5:46 that is you eigenchris
My guy here is way too underrated bro. This video right here is peak comedy. And the amount of videos he's posted, i really believe he deserves way more views and subs
can't wait for the video about entropy 😎
Short answer: it is a measure of the disorder of a system.
Long answer: you need calculus to quantitatively define entropy, and statistics to fully understand what it is at a molecular level. Entropy is a thermodynamic property of a system, that can be transferred with heat entering and exiting the system. As we track every infinitesimal unit of heat (dQ), we associate it with a corresponding Kelvin temperature T at which it transfers. The cumulative value of dQ/T for a given heat flow, will determine the entropy transfer associated with that heat flow.
I'm a mechanical engineer. My father was an electrical engineer. My father tried to teach me about electricity and circuitry, but since it all made sense to him, he couldn't explain it to me. It wasn't until I took physics 201 and basic electrical circuits in college that I finally understood what voltage was. However, being an engineer who mostly studied fluids, I like the 'garden hose analogy', where voltage is akin to water pressure......
0:26 i dont know what joule and coulomb is😂😂😂
Hi, a Hongkonger here. I only learnt about voltage when I was 16 years old. My teachers just teach the way you learnt at 19 years old to me: positive charge wants to go from high potential to low potential. I am now 25 years old and I still remember and understand.
As an Indian, I'm glad to say that the physics material for high school is quite richly explained on UA-cam by various teachers, and so I had understood work and energy and potential to an intuitive point. It just feels sad that all of those lectures are in Hindi and hence inaccessible to the rest of the world.
I too finally figured on my own the slope analogy.
Another proper one would be pressure I think.
Very sad no one taught us anything 🙃
So Voltage is how many little balls fit into a Coulomb when you bring the hill from infinity.
I am learning!
The whole idea of "relative to infinity" can be kind of confusing. Here's the way I recommend thinking about it.
Consider how for indefinite integrals, we always have to add that +C term. Why not just keep it simple, and let C equal zero? You'll ultimately subtract them anyway, for the application of definite integrals, so what's the point of the +C? There are applications where C isn't equal to zero, but they aren't where I'm intending to go with this.
It turns out, that the reference position of infinitely far away, is just a consequence of letting +C = 0, when we calculate electric potential from an electric field. It's an arbitrary reference point, that keeps the math simple, when integrating a function that starts as 1/r^2, and turning it into 1/r + C after integrating. That's why we do it this way, since 1/r will equal zero, when r is infinite.
My high school chemistry teacher would tell us that that we would be ready for our tests and really understood something if we could go home and teach it to our parents.
It took me ages to understand voltage. And charge as well. Here are the stages I went through:
1. Electrons move through a wire from a battery to a lightbulb. The lightbulb turns the electrons into light. AC isn't a thing.
2. Electrons carry charge through a wire. Charge is the same thing as electrical energy. The electrons deliver charge to the lightbulb, which it converts into light, but the electrons themselves are not consumed. AC still doesn't exist.
(2.1 - Breakthrough) I discovered Newton's equation for gravity, G = Mm/r^2. I wondered if there was an equivalent formula for the electromagnetic force. I wondered what the equivalent of mass for the electromagnetic force would be. I conjectured that it would be charge, and that charge is therefore to the electromagnetic force what mass is to gravity. I looked up Coulomb's formula and realised I was right. Eureka! So particles with more charge are more strongly influenced by the electromagnetic force and charge is also an inalienable property of particles that does not change at the subatomic level (if we ignore relativity).
3. Charge is a property of electrons. Electrical energy is not the same thing as charge. The formula Volts = Joules/ Coulombs now makes sense, as I know the difference between a Joule and a Coulomb. The movement of electrons produces an electromagnetic field that carries the energy, and the electrons do not need to move from the battery to the lightbulb to carry energy to it. I now also understand AC.
This was my experience with calculus. I didn’t take calc in school so had to take it at university. The way I phrase it to friends is that it seemed to me my education waited until college to tell me the punchline to the joke. In other words, all my mathematical studies up through college did not express to me any real “why” that had meaning to me.
Then, calculus was like “so how do we know the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the radius?” and I was blown away. All the many years of estimating in increasingly accurate but laborious ways the area of a circle solved by the calculus of infinitesimals. Woah.
Oh yeah, the AI apocalypse. Maybe we should do something about that.
Man... This make me feel feels so deep in my heart that I can't even explain. But two words came to me:
Thank you!
THE MOST RELEVANT VIDEO OF MY LIFE. 🙂
Language is just catalyst for understanding. It depends on reactant(student) how fast reaction will go
These joke videos are so incredibly funny , this is only my second one and I can tell I'm going to be watching them all!
Perfect. I'm actually teaching an electronics class right now.
Overthinking on its peak
I tend to struggle and take my time getting to know fundamental concepts such as voltage, because understanding basics makes a strong foundation that lets me solve very complex problems down the road. Currently with voltage, I know what it is, but I still feel like I can’t grasp it intuitively. Glad to know I’m not the only one.
Much milder on the brain than "What is Momentum?" !
I'm glad I'm not the only one who took so long to finally understand voltage! It's just the energy per coulomb (group of 6.24*10^18 electrons)
One of the most depressing thing students ever experience... And you just defined that depression.
What an amazing feeling it is to be one of the lucky few that found this channel today.
i had this exact thought… spent hours on it yet still incapable of understanding in detail it since it’s all just definitions within definitions, with different ways of interpreting those definitions….
i wondered what the point of a definition is if it can’t even accurately and fully define what i want to know.
Teachers in school just say “memorise formula” I may be a fool, trying to actually understand it in depth and lacking behind hence…
Wow, amazing you just described what we all struggled understanding physics simple topics but books making it more complicated/bizarre
you should make joke video channel about physic be a separate channel
The frustration is real.