Veritasium

Craig Shearer - 29 November 2021

Back on YouTube channels again - you may have heard of the YouTube channel Veritasium. This one is a generally good science channel which has nearly 11 million subscribers.

This week I came across one of his videos that made claims about misconceptions about electricity. Briefly, it makes claims about a thought experiment involving a battery, a bulb and a switch and about 300,000km of cable (roughly relating to the speed of light), and how long it would take for the bulb to light up once the switch was closed.

Veritasium’s approach of pointing out that the science you’ve been taught is wrong is not helpful. All science models are useful for describing reality, but they’re all approximations of reality.

To me, this is a big risk of popular science, particularly with topics designed for click bait, or presenting controversial “everything you thought you knew is wrong” topics. It doesn’t help that the name Veritasium, means truth. Viewers can take two paths on this. Conspiracy theorists could dismiss science as just another belief system. Skeptics and critical thinkers would question the claims and see whether they line up with conventional understanding of the science. Maybe Veritasium is the next Galileo, but the balance of probabilities suggests not.