I constructed the Veritasium electricity thought experiment in real life to test the result.

If you were watching my community posts a month ago, the day that Derek over on Veritasium posted his video about electricity misconceptions, you saw me obsess over that problem a bit too much and immediately use it as the excuse I've been looking for for years to own my own oscilloscope. Instead of two light-seconds of wire, I used about 3 light-microseconds of wire, but it was PLENTY to resolve exactly what is happening in this circuit. I hope you enjoy the analysis!

Thanks to Derek at Veritasium for his blessing to make a real-world version of his gedanken experiment. If you haven't seen his video yet, you might want to go watch that for context, and I also highly recommend ElectroBOOM's video on the topic and EEVBlog's video on the topic. Electroboom's video has some simulated scope traces extremely close to what I saw IRL, and a REALLY fantastic animation (8:27) of him waving an electron around in his hand, shedding magnetic fields as it moves (Even though I ignore magnetic fields in this video - I'm trying to think of a test to find out if they matter).

Veritasium https://youtu.be/bHIhgxav9LY
ElectroBOOM https://youtu.be/iph500cPK28
EEVBlog https://youtu.be/VQsoG45Y_00


Music Credits, etc.:
I Dunno by grapes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
http://ccmixter.org/files/grapes/16626