veritasium
patreon
WIP video about Braess’s Paradox — Kindly Requesting Feedback!
🕑 Added 2025-06-27 13:08:29 +0000 UTCWe’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions as we wrap up work on our next video. Please let us know your thoughts!
Thank you so much for your time and help.
-Team Ve
Comments
David Tseng
That’s a very interesting mechanism. I was wondering if there’s a chance it could be applied in architecture to help resist earthquakes.
Doctor Why
Wonder how the Lagrangian would look like?
Ann
Really enjoyed this! Thank you :)
Steve Platt
Agree w. Robin. A browser-based app allowing me to slowly pull down the mechanism and observe changes would be very helpful (and a lot of fun to play with). I'm also wondering if it would be possible to 3D print the 3 different (5 total) springs along with couplers, and make my own example. This is so close to being something I could play with in my home lab, which would greatly help with our understanding!
Costan
Considering the plastic chain of elements a mechanical device, this experiment suggests a few avenues for further research: variable (invers proportional) strain for continuously increasing stress, variable (proportional) stiffness (with variable resonanance frequency) as a function of stress, and possibly a new mechanical system/device that can maintain same displacement under variable loads. Also, the experiment reminded me of your video "How Flexible Machines Could Save The World" (March 12, 2019). These two subjects might have something in common, I think.
Kat Seibert
Very interesting
Bahman Engheta
Braess’s network is another embodiment of the prisoner's dilemma. Perhaps it's worth mentioning or even illustrating that, especially since there is a Veritasium video on that topic.
Robin
Please include a couple of slow motion segments of the little purple device. My eyes keep focusing on the pairs that snap into a straighter configuration, failing to watch the other pieces snap back, and what makes them do so. The explanation of the spring and string setup is perfectly clear. The road problem looks like a collective action problem, a form of the tragedy of the commons. Could it be solved with some version of road metering, where it's only legal to take the "short cut" when the light turns green, and sensors control the light? Metering is installed on many freeway on ramps. Does it actually help?
Bruce
This was a fascinating presentation. Since springs are like capacitors in an electric circuit, I wonder if the paradox can be duplicated in an electric circuit.
Kimberly Green
As soon as the counter-snap mechanism was shown I realized it could be used in buildings to minimize vibration. I'd like to see a mega-sized version tested in the Japan E-Defense earthquake simulator that producer Petr visited last year. I can also envision microscopic versions used to keep sensitive electronics stablized / in tolerance while in a dynamic environment such as a spacecraft launch. Or cardboard versions used in shipping to keep fragile objects in a protective container but not touching the container itself.
John Murphy
That was very cool! As you probably intended, my guess for the weight system at the beginning was to predict that it would go up - not that I figured out why or how, just from context. I thought the explanations were clear, including for the traffic diagrams, and the force/displacement graphs. I had a little bit of trouble with the three types of springs, trying to picture how each one resisted displacement, but that's probably something that really needs to be hands-on to really understand, and anyway I got the gist of it.
Charles S. Cook
Well done, and well explained!
Terry Bollinger
A fun topic, and the video already looks very close to final production quality. I did not see any noticeable glitches. The only thing that came to mind was that the transition from length to the frequency discussion seemed a little non-intuitive, but I think I may have just been a bit distracted at that moment. Just as adding additional cross paths to a transportation network can cause an overall slowdown, adding extra cross braces can weaken a bridge instead of strengthening it. This made me curious whether there is a mathematical connection between the flow networks and support lattices.
