Is Kirchhoff really for the birds? | Does Kirchhoff’s Voltage Law Always Work?
Audience:
Professor Walter Lewin’s famous experiment seems to show Kirchhoff’s Voltage Law failing in a changing magnetic field. Years later, ElectroBOOM challenged that conclusion, arguing that the measurements are correct—but the interpretation is not. In this video, we examine the experiment and what Faraday’s Law really tells us. We’ll start from first principles—beginning with vector calculus, moving through Maxwell’s equations, and finally arriving at Kirchhoff’s Voltage Law.
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Comments
I’ll be honest: I find 2 hours and 43 minutes too much to review. I’m fine with reviewing an hour long video if it’s well made, but reviewing almost 3 hours of video is challenging – especially if it’s on a topic I’m not an expert at. I know that skipping a vote is always an option, but I want to review every entry that has been assigned to me to be as fair as possible. Otherwise people will always skip anything over an hour.
This is why I’ll write my review from the perspective of a viewer who’s learning about this topic for the first time (which I am).
Motivation: It’s clear that you care about this topic a lot. Your curiosity and vigor is definitely contagious and respectable.
Clarity: The video has a clear and intentional structure. There’s an introduction and reasonable sections. However, as a new viewer, I’m already lost at the 23 minute mark – and at this time stamp I still have 2 hours and 20 minutes of video left to review. This is not simply my attention span lacking, since I find your video to be well-made. Your visuals keep me engaged; your narration is comprehensible and meaningful; there’s clear intent in what you’re trying to convey. But the topic is so complex that I feel like I already have to be an expert to be able to follow it (which admittedly is your target audience). Your visualizations are absolutely amazing!
Novelty: There’s so much content in this single video that I cannot judge whether it’s presenting something novel or not. This could also have been a video series with 8 videos of 20 minutes each.
Memorability: With a video longer than most feature length movies, there will naturally be a few pieces of knowledge that I’ll remember and many that I don’t. The sheer volume of information somewhat prevents the focus on individual sections, at least when watching the video for the first time.
An expert on this topic might give you applause for this video, but for me it’s too much to properly review. Be aware that only a fraction of my review’s score is on the math and physics presented in this video. Due to the length of the video, I didn’t go into detail on the various sections. Rather, I’m rating it as a whole package. With this said, this video is way better than most videos I’ve watched so far, despite or maybe because of its length. It’s clearly visible how much time, effort and intention went into this video. The lively comments under your video reflect that.
Wow, that’s a really long video. It’s practically a movie… You should break it up into shorter videos, each focusing on a specific subtopic. That said, the amount of work you’ve put into it is impressive. There are a lot of very small bits of text on some slides, you spend time explaining things that should already be familiar to people looking for this kind of content, and sometimes the pacing becomes excessively slow… I’d suggest following these tips… you’ll see that it’ll make things easier for you as well.
Obviously way too long. And the whole “Kirchhoff is wrong because it doesn’t always hold” especially when using the angry old white guy (Loon? or whatever) is kinda cringe. Could have been a real nice 15 minutes video on what laws of physics are and how assumptions are used in science. But in this form, rather meh.