4 ms·
It'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 bet
by thaumaturgy 6y ago
It'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.
- mickfaraday 6y agoThanks for commenting. The primary problem with the other analogies is that they don't use real objects. Physics is the science that studies objects that exist, after all. That means we can't be crashing concepts into one another (like charge reification, for instance). It's important to begin physical explanations with objects instead of concepts, so we advance the atom. While this depiction of the atom isn't the end-all-be-all atom, it's a step in the right direction, hopefully.
- bvrmn 6y agoAnalogies are needed to grasp concept and allow to do predictions. This visualization was meaningless for me. I can't predict what will happen if we make three point connection with different potential for example.