Previously I was used to thinking of dead ends as simply functionally inert. That without a circuit, nothing at all happens in the dead end wire other than the potential for something to happen.
Sure I know something more than nothing actually happens since there is an elevated charge there. But still just the mental model shorthand is that no circuit = no nuthin.
But it's not. It's actually like a pipe with a little bit of air to allow for some compression, and even the dead end has a small flow that travels to the end and builds up against it, then rebounds back and eventially levels out at some homogenious but now higher pressure.
That just boggles me! I love it.
Inductance doesn't have an analog. To some extent, the inertia of the fluid cam model some of it, I suppose. Like what is "water hammer" in plumbing? The circuit is too suddenly broken, but the water wants to keep moving. There's gotta be a resulting momentary pressure rise there in the closed-off line, similar to voltage rising in an interrupted inductor. If the valve were some weak piece of crap relative to the mass of the water, the water would break it: like arcing.
[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321225042_A_novel_w...
> The crossover from subsonic to supersonic flow coincides with a discontinuity in the local electrochemical potential, analogous to the hydraulic jump observed in supercritical classical fluids Gilmore et al. (1950). We identify the electronic shock through combined global transport and local Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM), confirming the presence of compressible electron flow
Additional "imaging for electron vortices" from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919958 re: the kondo effect and hydrodynamics :
> [ nanoscale scanning magnetometer, terahertz pump–probe spectroscopy ]