this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
376 points (97.5% liked)
Greentext
7706 readers
1170 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Veritasium kinda obviously dumbs things down and sensationalizes stuff somewhat, compared to actual scientific content creators. But the peak of this was when he popped up with a video about how “electricity works differently than everyone thought”, with the two long wires doing induction or whatever, and then every physics and electrics youtuber had a reply video explaining how Veritasium was wrong with his theory.
fun fact: i study physics and one of our profs actually referred to exactly this video as a nice visualization of what we were doing in class. they said that the video's right, actually, but there's lot of dumb people on the internet who don't get that and who nonsensically shit on stuff.
Veritasium's first video was making the claim that a thr setup with wires stretching in either direction for a mile would have the lightbulb turn on faster than electrons or even light could travel through the wires. This is because the electric field extends out of the wire in all directions, not through the wire, and inducts through the other end of the wire without travelling all of the distance.
Then a bunch of other Youtubers made response videos saying he was wrong.
Then Veritasium made a second video where they actually did the experiment and proved themselves right.
You don't know what you're talking about. Shut up.
The whole thing seemed to be engineered for drama, and the "results" that most people got out of it are an exceptionally clickbaity oversimplification of what's going on. It's like that numberphile thing with 1 + 2 + 3 + ...
It's more complicated than the lightbulb just "turning on faster than the electric field could travel through the wire", in fact (depending on the exact circumstances) the initial current would be tiny, probably not enough to meaningfully "light" the lightbulb, and only after the light-speed delay would it ramp up to full-brightness.
Electric field obviously travels in all directions, but the electrons which produce fluctuations in the electric field, and propagate those fluctuations through mutual interactions, are constrained to the wire. Hence unless your wires are so close together as to basically be connected to each other, air significantly attenuates the electric field wave propagation. This is a reproduction of the experiment and an in-depth explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vrhk5OjBP8 .
I still watch his videos sometimes because it can be quite entertaining/thought-provoking, but for the past 5-7 years a lot of them are clickbaity sponsored stuff, and you really need to mentally skip a lot of bullshit to get to the nugget of value.
Yeah, sounds exactly like science to me. Here's my claim, here's how I came to that conclusion, now show me how I messed up.
I don't think most people realize that most science YouTubers are expert communicators, not necessarily experts in any particular science field.
No, Veritasium did the experiment and proved Veritasium right
I was agreeing with you. He made a new claim, showed his work, and asked, indirectly by posting the first video, to have experts in the field prove it wrong, or right.