One Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in one minute! In this episode, we discuss the basic nature of gravity, one of the four fundamental forces in our universe.
In this episode, we discuss Dark Matter, an exotic type of matter we know very little about, despite the fact that it makes up around 80% of all matter in the universe!
In this episode, we discuss the Wave Particle Duality and why quantum mechanics is weirder than anything we're used to in our daily lives!
In this episode, I revisit the wave particle duality and present an intuitive analogy for understanding how it works. Plus, new music by Nathaniel Schroeder!
In this episode, we learn about how the sun can burn for billions of years without running out of fuel.
In this episode, we talk about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and how it's not really that weird - it's just a property of waves!
This episode is a little bit different from the norm, because I've created the sound of hydrogen - or, that is, what if it would sound like if it emitted sound instead of light waves!
In this episode we explain what quantum tunneling is and how it works!
In this episode we take a break from physics and do a little fuzzy math. But not really: this is actually relevant to physics! Come back and I'll explain later.
In this tutorial I show how I synthesized the sound of hydrogen for the "Sound of Hydrogen" video (S2011E07) using mathematica - it's a little technical, but you've been requesting it!
In this episode we talk about dimensions and how we know that we live in 3D (or do we?).
Time is shorter than you think! In this episode we talk about distance in space and time and answer "How far away is tomorrow?"
Fire it up! We explain hot stuff. In this episode we explain why fire is red, gas flames are blue, and why you're too cool to glow.
How does physics deal with infinity? In this episode we explain how physicists can tease information out of infinity.
No cats were harmed in the making of this video. In this episode we discuss Schrödinger's cat, quantum entanglement, and our perception of reality.
Guest narrator Sean Carroll of Caltech describes dark energy and the acceleration of the universe, the discovery of which was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics on October 4th.
Pink doesn't exist!
How does light speed up after leaving glass or water? What do light and the President of the United States have in common?
You can break the speed of light in your back yard! (but don't worry, Einstein is still right)
GPS is just a big clock in space! (and it can detect nuclear explosions)
Why is the past different from the future? Caltech physicist Sean Carroll explains how the arrow of time is not an intrinsic property of physics, but rather an emergent feature.
A million dollars is a ton of money. But how much does it weigh?
Ever tried to comb a hairy ball? Math says you failed!
How does a laser really work? It's Bose - Einstein statistics! (photons are bosons)
Teach your teacher: the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge WASN'T resonance. And I defer all arguments to the elocution of Profs. Billah and Scanlon: http://www.ketchum.org/billah/Billah-Scanlan.pdf
Neutrinos are the vampires of physics.
Come with us to Italy to find out what went into measuring the FTL neutrinos.
Bad tidings - the tides are slowing down the earth!
Zach Weiner of SMBC comics is guest illustrator on MinutePhysics! Why are some stones round and others flat?
Why circles are round (and triangles too!)
Two linemen colliding can light a 60W bulb for over a minute!
How much do you need to vomit in order to levitate?
The basic physics behind how rockets work! (plus a special announcement)
A brief intro to the current theory of (almost) everything - the Standard Model of particle physics. It's like cake, only universal.
What is matter, anyway? What does it have to do with math? And why aren't you made of Jesus? Delving deeper into the theory of (almost) everything - the Standard Model of particle physics.
It's leap year time... so what are years, anyway? And what do they have to do with the supermassive black hole in the core of the milky way?
Pi day (3.14) is Albert Einstein's Birthday! To celebrate, we'll explain 4 of his most groundbreaking papers from 1905, when he was just 26 years old.
How do we know atoms exist? And just how big are they? Pi day (3.14) is Albert Einstein's Birthday! To celebrate, we'll explain 4 of his most groundbreaking papers from 1905, when he was just 26 years old.
How Einstein (& others) discovered Special Relativity. Pi day (3.14) is Albert Einstein's Birthday! To celebrate, we'll explain 4 of his most groundbreaking papers from 1905, when he was just 26 years old.
Ever wonder how Einstein proved E=mc²? This is how. Pi day (3.14) is Albert Einstein's Birthday! To celebrate, we'll explain 4 of his most groundbreaking papers from 1905, when he was just 26 years old.
Ten second clip before S2012E14.
The moon may be 1.3 light-seconds away, but why on earth do we measure distances using time?
Just because there are four dimensions doesn't mean there's a "fourth dimension"
Have you ever wondered where "Ye Olde" spelling comes from? Today we unravel this thorny linguistic issue.
If gravity is so attractive, why doesn't the earth just crash into the sun? Or the moon into the earth? The answer: Stable Orbits
Video recorded from the Google+ Hangout on Air from the Education on Air Conference. People in the video are (from left to right) Brittan Berry, google+ moderator Henry Reich, MinutePhysics James Sanders, teacher and youtube.com/edu guru Michael Stevens, Vsauce Sai, cognitive science guru Derek Muller, Veritasium
"Some infinities are bigger than other infinities" - Hazel Grace Lancaster, in "The Fault in Our Stars," by John Green
In which we explain economic equilibrium, how to make money from nothing, and every fundamental force in physics.
A big Thank You to all who have supported MinutePhysics! You are the reason I can keep making these videos every week.
Prove πR² using only beads and a ruler! Henry Reich first saw this proof in an article by Russell Jay Hendel, Dowling College
Where does all the stuff in the universe come from?
Ever wanted to explore the Cosmic Background Radiation? It's our best picture of the big bang, and now you can! http://www.bigbangregistry.com
My open letter to the universe.
The Higgs Boson. What more need be said? Two more Higgs videos coming soon.
MinutePhysics is one year old!
What is mass and what does it have to do with the Higgs Boson?
How do you know when you've "discovered" a particle? What do we mean by "discovery"?
Do you want to know about the physics of sports? Which ones?
Which is the most intense Olympic throwing event? Shot put? Hammer? Discus? Javelin?
London Bridge has already been rebuilt twice! But what happened to the bridges that came down?
Who's faster over 10 meters - the fastest sprinter in the world, or gravity?
What if there were a tunnel through the middle of the earth and you jumped in?
AfterEffects Tutorial on how to Simulate the Universe: http://dft.ba/-3v1X Millennium Simulation - http://dft.ba/-3v12 Also, explore a map of the big bang! http://www.bigbangregistry.com
What is a sport? Do arbitrary and technophobic rules matter?
Tutorial for using After Effects to Simulate the Universe. CMB data image used in the tutorial: http://imgur.com/XU9rl
Have you ever wondered why you look up and see a dark sky at night?
Check out the Massey Lectures with Neil Turok: http://dft.ba/-massey
What was the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics given for? Capturing a single photon of light!
Check out the Massey Lectures with Neil Turok: http://dft.ba/-massey
You've heard of E=mc²... but you probably haven't heard the whole story.
Einstein didn't like quantum mechanics because it wasn't able to make perfect predictions... but science is not about what you like, it's about what's true!
An open letter from Henry to the President.
In this quantum world, what does it mean to touch something? Do we really hover above the chairs we're sitting in?
Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked by the Templeton Foundation to answer the question "Does the Universe Have a Purpose". Then he read his answer aloud and I drew some pictures for it.
What if you thought the earth was flat? And then you found out it isn't?
What else did we leave on the moon? Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains.
Will walking or running in the rain leave you less wet? For recent scientific publications on the walk/rain question: http://iopscience.iop.org/0143-0807/33/5/1321
10 reasons why we know the Earth is not flat, but rather quite spherical in shape.
Why p=mv is not completely true.
The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
Henry's incomplete list of the best science sites Big Red Button - http://inception.davepedu.com xkcd - http://xkcd.com/1131/ xkcd what if? - http://what-if.xkcd.com/3/ Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2867 Empirical Zeal - http://www.empiricalzeal.com/ Sean Carroll - http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/b... Terry Tao - http://terrytao.wordpress.com/ It's Okay To Be Smart - http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com/ I ¶#@*ing Love Science - https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLove... NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day - http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html Radiolab - http://www.radiolab.org HyperPhysics - http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/ The Scale of the Universe - http://htwins.net/scale2/ The Character of Physical Law - http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/ Fake Science - http://fakescience.tumblr.com/ Youtube Channels Veritasium - http://www.youtube.com/user/1veritasium Sixty Symbols - http://www.sixtysymbols.com/ Periodic Videos - http://www.periodicvideos.com/ Crash Course - http://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse The Brain Scoop - http://www.youtube.com/thebrainscoop Smarter Every Day - http://www.youtube.com/destinws2 Vi Hart - http://www.youtube.com/vihart George Hart - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTl0... Numberphile - http://www.numberphile.com/ Vsauce - http://www.youtube.com/user/Vsauce TED-Ed - http://www.youtube.com/teded MinuteEarth - http://www.youtube.com/user/minuteearth
It's everything or just some things.. Time to get specific.
It has NO EDGE. And NO CENTER... or does it?
Science explaining the science behind the possibility of Parallel Universes.
More Theories on Parallel Universes. This time? Many Worlds Theory.
Promo for new channel MinuteEarth MinuteEarth: http://youtube.com/minuteearth MinutoDeFisica: http://youtube.com/minutodefisica MinutoDeLaTierra: http://youtube.com/minutodelatierra
Visual Proof on the F.O.I.L. method of order of operations.
Explanation of the F.O.I.L. video and why there are sponsors.
Morally wrong, that is...
Can Humans Really Feel Temperature? Henry takes a look at the same question Dr. Derek Muller of the channel Veritasium did.
Another awesome thing the Mantis Shrimp does... The BEST Sonoluminescence reference: http://doc.utwente.nl/42577/1/single-bubble_sonoluminescence.pdf
Is it in the Arctic Ocean? In Canada? Russia?
Henry explains if we expand with the Universe or if the Universe expands at all.
Looking for God, finding science.
Henry explains how our frame of reference determines where we see the center of the Universe.
Henry explains how magnets work, with some help from Dr. Derek Muller over at Veritasium.
Henry explains how to destroy a magnet.
Henry explains diamagnetism and how to levitate a frog.
Henry Explains how time travel is not only possible, but we all do it every day.
Henry explains what sea level is. FREE FACT: An oblate spheroid is a special case of an ellipsoid where two of the semi-principal axes are the same size.
Henry explain why the Earth's tilted axis not only effects the seasons but our view of the moon.
Henry explains why our solar system is a flat disc.
Henry explains how Evolution and Natural Selection are not synonyms.
Henry briefly explains how light bulbs work today compared to the bulbs of the past.
Henry explains how polarization can tell us about the big bang.
Henry explains how some things aren't relative.
Henry shows how to see something clearly without your glasses.
Max Tegmark explains how math is the language of the Universe.
The science behind debunking how far Legolas from the Lord of the Rings can see.
Henry explains why we draw stick figures the way we do for charity. Comic Relief and the School of YouTube.
Henry explains why we draw stars with points.
Henry explains what antimatter is.
Henry explains how light scattering cause the sun to appear yellow and the sky blue.
Henry explains ROYGBIV. Or is it ROYGCB?
Henry explains why the sky isn't purple.
Henry was given a problem from Dan Hoff dubbed the "100 Prisoners Problem". After watching, would you take the bet?
Henry reveals the solution to the "100 Prisoners Problem" from S2014E14.
Henry explains why driving backwards is so difficult.
Henry travels to France, Germany, & the UK to visit the Airbus headquarters and facilities and see so much incredible engineering in a behind-the-scenes look of the new Airbus A350 being built.
Henry demostrates a simple proof of Conservation of Energy.
Rain shouldn't happen, according to basic physics.
Pianos can't be perfectly tuned - it's a mathematical fact!
Do you want to go to space? Do you want to learn about bending computers and boxes that make clothes smell better and sky boats with turning wings?
If the earth is spinning to the east at 1000 miles per hour... why can't we fly west more easily?
This video is about weird condensed matter systems, aka materials that have bizarre emergent particles in them that are unlike most other particles in the universe.
Concrete doesn’t dry - it sets!
Also, why do some flames look hollow?
The physics behind the perfect size of a jet engine.
What if you went back in time and killed your own grandfather? Would you still be born? Or would you have thus killed yourself?
This video is about gravitational waves in the weak field limit as discovered by the LIGO collaboration, explained by parallels to electromagnetic radiation, sound waves, water waves, etc. I want to see Cat LIGO ASAP!
This video is about the orbital mechanics of why it’s so hard to crash into the sun – the energy it takes to get there is astoundingly high, compared with leaving the solar system.
This video is about the definition of a day, and how it applies (or not) on the sun. Solar day, sidereal day, universal coordinated time (UTC) day, etc. Length of a day.
This video is about the famous “Twin paradox” of special relativity, and how time can appear to be faster for two different observers at the same time.
One of the most famous paradoxes of all of physics – who's older? Who's younger? and WHY?
This video is about why entropy gives rise to the arrow of time, and also how the initial low-entropy condition of the universe is responsible for the fact that we experience time right now, and how ultimately it will lead to the high-entropy heat death of the universe.
This video is about why there's no such thing as cause and effect at the level of fundamental particle physics, and how our everyday experience of cause and effect arises due to entropy, the large-scale arrow of time, and the leverage certain events have over others. This can explain not only the existence of causes and effects, but also memories, records and so on.
This video is about the difference between complexity and entropy, and how we can see complex things like life, planets, galaxies, humans, intelligence, consciousness, etc arising in our universe when the overall tendency of the second law of thermodynamics is towards increasing entropy and disorder. It turns out that gravitational collapse & other complex structures (such as tendrils that form when coffee and milk mix) arise naturally as part of the path towards increasing entropy.
This video is about how we don't just need energy to power our lives, we need *low entropy* energy!
This video is about how life arose and what its main function or purpose in the universe seems to be.
Why you can’t clone Schrödinger’s cat: this video presents the full proof of the “No Cloning” Theorem in Quantum Mechanics – without any fancy math! (stereotypical qubit has been replaced with Schrödinger’s cat). The full proof relies on the linearity of quantum (aka unitary) transformations, and the tensor product of multiple systems, to show that perfect cloning is impossible (though teleportation is allowed)
How to teleport Schrödinger’s cat: this video presents the full quantum teleportation procedure, in which an arbitrary qubit (spin, etc) is teleported from Alice to Bob by way of a pair of particles entangled in a bell (EPR) state and the transmission of information via a classical channel.
Is it better to walk or run when it's cold out? If you run, then you have to deal with wind, wind chill, etc, but your body generates more heat. If you stay still, standing or walking slowly, you don't generate as much heat, but don't deal with the wind. Note: the simple calculations in this video don't very well take into account the baseline metabolic rate/heat generation, even at rest, of humans.
This is a video about how science is both inherently political and apolitical. And how hopefully we won't end up in nuclear war...
The universe is expanding – this we know from looking at red shifts of distant galaxies – but the acceleration of the universe's expansion is harder to measure. It requires measuring the change of recession velocity over time, and it's done by comparing Type Ia supernovas as standard candles at different distances, which is how we know the universe is accelerating!
This video is about what would happen if we built a giant ring around earth – what would happen to the ring, that is. Would if fall? Collapse? Start spinning?
This video is a footnote for the video about the ring around the earth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xSPlQUejd8 Essentially, a ring around the earth is in unstable equilibrium, so it would stay put, but then fall one way or the other as soon as any asymmetry (even thermal or quantum fluctuations) developed.
Neutral particle oscillation (like neutrino oscillation) is a superposition effect, and a similar effect can also be seen in a coupled double pendulum system where the interaction states are in superpositions of the "free" modes (called eigenstates).
This video is about a multistable perceptual illusion, similar to the hollow face illusion, whereby maps or aerial or satellite photos look upside down/inside out, ie, concave (valley) parts look convex and convex (mountainous) parts look concave. Just flip the images around and things will make a lot more sense! It's just because our eyes gauge depth based on the location of shadows, and the sun always casts shadows on the bottoms of things.
This video is about why it's harder to successfully land spacecraft and landers and rovers on Mars than on Earth, or Venus, or the Moon, or Titan, or asteroids. It all comes down to atmospheric density! When there's no atmosphere, you can do a powered descent in a flimsy tinfoil spacecraft like the Lunar Module, and when there's plenty of atmosphere you can do an unpowered descent via heat shield and parachutes like the space shuttle, Apollo command module, Soyuz, Huygens, etc. But on Mars with its thin air, you have to do both powered & unpowered descent, getting the worst of both worlds.
This video is about the local and global geometry and curvature of space and spacetime, aka, is space flat? Negatively curved? Positively curved? etc.
Can Batteries Power Everything? This video is about the physical and chemical limitations to electrolytic batteries, and how we might surpass the energy density and specific energy of lithium-ion batteries (like the Panasonic 18650 batteries used in the Tesla Model S, for example).
This video is about the differences between the corpses or final degenerate dense star forms that dead stars take: black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs. The main distinguishing features between them are the mass cutoffs (Chandrasekhar limit and Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff Limit), the matter that makes them up (electrons, protons, neutrons, singularity?), and what holds them up against gravity – not thermal pressure from nuclear fusion like in a star like the sun, but electron or neutron degeneracy pressure (fermi pressure/pauli exclusion principle), and the strong nuclear force, and... nothing (in the case of a black hole).
This video is about how causal models (which use causal networks) allow us to infer causation from correlation, proving the common refrain not entirely accurate: statistics CAN be used to prove causality! Including: Reichenbach's principle, common causes, feedback, entanglement, EPR paradox, and so on.
Feedback loops and spurious correlations!
We live in an era of self driving cars, autonomous drones, deep learning algorithms, computers that beat humans at chess and go, and so on. So it’s natural to ask, will artificial superintelligence replace humans, take our jobs, and destroy human civilization? Or will AI just become tools like regular computers. AI researcher Max Tegmark helps explain the myths and facts about superintelligence, the impending machine takeover, etc.
This video is about Bell's Theorem, one of the most fascinating results in 20th century physics. Even though Albert Einstein (together with collaborators in the EPR Paradox paper) wanted to show that quantum mechanics must be incomplete because it was nonlocal (he didn't like "spooky action at a distance"), John Bell managed to prove that any local real hidden variable theory would have to satisfy certain simple statistical properties that quantum mechanical experiments (and the theory that describes them) violate. Since then, GHZ and others have managed to extend the theoretical work, and Alain Aspect performed the first Bell test experiment in the late 1980s.
This video is about using particle accelerators as part of the solar panel silicon wafer manufacturing process. The accelerators embed protons into the wafer crystals, allowing them to break and separate from the main crystal in much thinner wafers with no waste silicon. Thus, monocrystalline silicon can be used, which is more efficient.
This video is about the international system of units (SI), the international prototype kilogram (the IPK or "le grande k"), and specifically, why we need to redefine our base units in terms of fundamental constants - aka, concepts & ideas - rather than physical objects. The second is already defined in terms of a certain number of oscillations of a photon of the ground state hyperfine splitting energy of Cesium, the meter is then defined as how far light travels in a particular fraction of a second, and hopefully soon, the kilogram will be defined either using the Avogadro approach of counting silicon atoms in a sphere, or using the Watt (Kibble) Balance approach of measuring Planck's constant, h, as used in the formula E=hf for the energy of a photon, which relates to mass via Einstein's famous E=mc^2.
This video is about Simpson's paradox, a statistical paradox and ecological fallacy where seemingly contradictory results are implied by a single set of data depending on how it's grouped. The paradox can arise in medical studies, student test scores, and so on.
For ages I’ve been thinking about doing a video analyzing time travel in fiction and doing a comparison of different fictional time travels – some do use wormholes, some relativistic/faster than light travel with time dilation, some closed timelike curves, some have essentially “magic” or no consistent rules that make any sense, or TARDIS's, or whatever. This video is an explanation of how time travel functions in different popular movies, books, & shows – not how it works “under the hood", but how it causally affects the perspective of characters’ timelines (who has free will? can you change things by going back to the past or forwards into the future?). In particular, I explain Ender's Game, Planet of the Apes, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Primer, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Back to the Future, Groundhog Day, Looper, the video game “Braid”, and Lifeline.
This video is about how to tell whether or not university admissions are biased using statistics: aka, it's about Simpson's Paradox again!
This video is about the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole, (its "event horizon"), and how much mass and density is required to reach the point of no return where an object like a star, neutron star, red giant, etc will collapse into a black hole singularity. You can calculate it yourself using just the volume equation for a sphere, and the equation for the Schwarzschild radius (and knowing the speed of light and Newton's gravitational constant).
This video is about how efficient various reactions are at converting mass to energy (as we know from the Einstein mass-energy equivalence of E=mc^2). Antimatter is very efficient but it is not naturally-occurring. Chemical reactions like fire or explosions are very inefficient. Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion are better, but not amazing on an absolute scale. Non-rotating black holes (Schwarzschild) and rotating (Kerr) are by far the most efficient, due to their accretion disks and very small radius of their innermost stable circular orbits.
This video is about the astronomical amount of astronomical evidence for black holes, ranging from x-ray binaries with accretion disks, supermassive infrared-radiating galactic nuclei black holes, orbital characteristics of high mass binaries, and direct gravitational wave detection of inspiraling merging black hole binaries with LIGO. Yes, they're real.
This is the first in a series of videos about special relativity. This is definitely not an academic course, but it's going to be a more in depth and developed exploration of a single topic than a typical standalone MinutePhysics video. I've been greatly inspired (and heckled) to do this by my friend Grant Sanderson of 3blue1brown who's set the standard for this kind of thing with his excellent series - serieses? - on calculus and linear algebra. So, special relativity. Special relativity is one of the most popularly famous ideas in physics – it's that thing that Einstein figured out about the speed of light and space and time and E=mc^2! It changed our understanding of the universe. And its core ideas are accessible in principle to anyone who understands some basic algebra and geometry - you don't even need to know calculus! And yet in spite of this, special relativity is one of the subjects in physics that confuses the most people, and in many cases turns them away from physics altogether.
This video is chapter 2 in my series on special relativity, and it covers spacetime diagrams, rotational and translational symmetry of both time and space, how certain transformations preserve distances (measured in terms of a reference like a meter or second), and so on. We'll wait until the next video to talk about Lorentz transformations, relativity of velocity, minkowski diagrams, and the speed of light.
Thanks to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project and the Space Telescope Science Institute for supporting this video. This video is about the line between Brown dwarfs and gas giant planets (aka super Jupiter's): does it exist? Is it the deuterium-burning threshold? Behavior? Metallicity? Formation? Or is there no meaningful scientific distinction, and are brown dwarfs and giant planets really all on a spectrum with no clear line between them?
This video is chapter 3 in my series on special relativity, and it covers boosts, galilean transformations, newtonian relativity, and of course Lorentz transformations, the constancy of the speed of light, relative changes of velocity between inertial reference frames, etc - some of the stuff Einstein figured out. I introduce the mechanical minkowski diagram, aka mechanical Lorentz transformation, aka spacetime globe.
This video is chapter 4 in my series on special relativity, and it covers how things that appear simultaneous from one perspective in our universe aren't simultaneous from other moving perspectives - that is, from inertial reference frames moving at different speeds. This is explained via the Lorentz transformation of coordinates of the events in question, enacted with a mechanical minkowski diagram, aka mechanical Lorentz transformation, aka spacetime globe.
This video is chapter 5 in my series on special relativity, and it covers how things that are moving (that is, moving relative to an inertial reference frame) at different speeds appear to be shorter in length... and longer in length. And shorter in time, and longer in time. It all makes sense, I promise, and is clear when you use the Lorentz transformation of coordinates of the events in question, enacted with a mechanical minkowski diagram, aka mechanical Lorentz transformation, aka spacetime globe.
This video is chapter 6 in my series on special relativity, and it covers the topic of relativistic addition of velocity: aka, how things that are moving relative to one inertial reference frame, which is moving relative to another reference frame, what speed or velocity are those things moving relative to the second frame. We'll show this using the Lorentz transformation of moving worldlines, enacted with a mechanical minkowski diagram, aka mechanical Lorentz transformation, aka spacetime globe.
This video is about the cycloid curves on Jupiter's moon Europa - they're ridges or valleys in the icy surface that formed due to some sort of geological or tectonic-esque phenomenon. The answer involves ping pong balls, the pacific ring of fire, subduction, tidal bulges, and tailcracking,
This video is chapter 7 in my series on special relativity, and it covers the idea that some things AREN'T relative: there IS a sense of absolute length and absolute time, which can be agreed upon from all moving perspectives (as long as they're inertial reference frames). In particular, proper length and proper time, aka the spacetime interval. Essentially, this is the spacetime version of the pythagorean theorem, and we'll explore it using the Lorentz transformations of lengths and time intervals, enacted with a mechanical minkowski diagram, aka mechanical Lorentz transformation, aka spacetime globe.
This video recounts a lecture by Richard Feynman giving an elementary demonstration of why planets orbit in ellipses. See the excellent book by Judith and David Goodstein, "Feynman's lost lecture”, for the full story behind this lecture, and a deeper dive into its content.
This video is about how the physics and chemistry of sugar (in particular, how it melts, and how it caramelizes) is more complicated than you might think. It involves fructose, sucrose, glucose, and a sticky mess.
This video is chapter 8 in my series on special relativity, and it presents a hands-on explanation of the resolution to the Twins Paradox using the mechanical minkowski diagram, aka mechanical Lorentz transformation, aka spacetime globe. Of course, the Twins paradox can be resolved with an understanding of spacetime intervals, relative inertial frames of reference, etc, but this is a nice hands-on version where you actually measure the proper times on a real, physical spacetime diagram with a ruler.
This video is about Tuned Mass Dampers, which can be used to reduce or avoid unwanted vibrations, swaying, swinging, bending, etc on engineered structures ranging from buildings, skyscrapers, electricity power transmission lines, airplane engines, formula one race cars, etc. TMD's use damped coupled oscillators.
This video is about the original cold fusion: μ muon-catalyzed cold fusion of deuterium, tritium, hydrogen, into helium-3 and helium 4. The problems with it are the half-life of muons and the sticking of muons to alpha particles. Also involved are neutrons, protons, break-even, etc. This has nothing to do with fusion by capture in palladium electrodes.
This video is about how terrestrial muons are part of our experimental proof of time dilation, length contraction, and special relativity in general.
This video is about Hardy's Paradox, wherein an electron and positron (or photons polarized horizontally and vertically) pass through Mach-Zehnder interferometers that overlap such that the particles have a chance of annihilating. If they do annihilate, then the interference pattern changes and there is a probability for both particles to be detected in the "dark arms" of the detector, that is, where previously there was no probability for detection for either particle. The paradox has implications for local realism, contextuality, lorentz elements of reality, and has been used as an experimental setup for weak measurements.
This video is about how to create muons in a particle accelerator via bombardment of heavy nuclei with protons, which results in creation of charged pions (plus and minus). The pions then decay into muons and mu neutrinos, and the muons then decay into electrons or positrons and more neutrinos. Muons also form in the upper atmosphere due to cosmic rays, and the uses of muons includes experimental tests of time dilation in special relativity, catalyzing muonic cold nuclear fusion, and more.
This video is about the cosmic distance scale and how we see objects farther away in space (ie at higher red shift) farther back in time because light takes time to reach us. Thus we can see not only stars and galaxies, but also the primordial stars & proto-galaxies, and even the remnants of the beginning of the universe itself: the CMB cosmic microwave background left over from the big bang.
This joke video is about how Internet Service Providers (aka ISPs, internet companies, telecommunications companies, etc) violate the basic axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. Like the axiom of choice (sometimes Well-ordering theorem), the Axiom of extensionality, Axiom of regularity (also called the Axiom of foundation), Axiom schema of specification, Axiom of pairing, Axiom of union, Axiom schema of replacement, Axiom of infinity, Axiom of power set.
This video is about compressed air cans (aka gas dusters) and why they get cold when you spray them.
This video explains Shor’s Algorithm, a way to efficiently factor large pseudoprime integers into their prime factors using a quantum computer. The quantum computation relies on the number-theoretic analysis of the factoring problem via modular arithmetic mod N (where N is the number to be factored), and finding the order or period of a random coprime number mod N. The exponential speedup comes in part from the use of the quantum fast fourier transform which achieves interference among frequencies that are not related to the period (period-finding is the goal of the QFT FFT).
This video explains how Shor’s Algorithm factors the pseudoprime number 314191 into its prime factors using a quantum computer. The quantum computation relies on the number-theoretic analysis of the factoring problem via modular arithmetic mod N (where N is the number to be factored), and finding the order or period of a random coprime number mod N. The exponential speedup comes in part from the use of the quantum fast fourier transform which achieves interference among frequencies that are not related to the period (period-finding is the goal of the QFT FFT).
This video is about how I designed and made my own custom mute guitar pedal for my clip-on mic and piezo pickup on my violin (fiddle). The mic is an AT Pro35 phantom powered XLR condensor microphone, and the pickup is a Fishman V200 piezoelectric transducer. I got all of the parts from PartsExpress.
This video is about how little we know about the behavior of gravity at short length and distance scales, what the constraints are on the inverse square law/Newton's law of universal gravitation, at the human and microscopic and atomic scales. Only on solar system scales or larger do we have good constraints on Newton's law of gravitation.
This video is about the Portal Paradox - a paradox in the video game Portal (and Portal 2) regarding whether or not a companion cube passing through a moving portal plops out of the other end with no speed (velocity, momentum), or shoots out at high speed. It’s a question of conservation of momentum, relativity of velocities, wormholes, 3D printers and quantum teleportation, glitches, and more.
This video is about how Albert Einstein made a mistake when applying the Field Equations of General Relativity to cosmology (in particular, to a static, constant density universe), and solved the problem by introducing the cosmological constant, rather than allowing for a dynamic universe with a scale factor - that is, the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker universe, first developed by Alexander Friedmann of Russia. Later, it was discovered by the Slipher and Hubble red-shift that the universe is indeed expanding, and even later, by Schwarz and company in 1998, that the expansion is accelerating - aka, dark energy. And the cosmological constant was re-introduced.
This video is about the length of a solar day vs a stellar day vs a mean standard day, what they all have to do with each other and the earth's orbit, eccentricity, axial tilt, and so on. Also, aliens and asteroids. It'll explain the equation of time, and why the longest day is in December. The lab will also show you what days are like on all the other planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and even - though it's not a planet - Pluto.
The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the #1 New York Times bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole.
This video was made in collaboration with the US Census Bureau and fact-checked by Census Bureau scientists. Any opinions and errors are my own.
Cynthia Dwork (key inventor of Differential Privacy), giving a great intro talk about differential privacy
This video is about how Russian physicist Aleksandr Fridman corrected Albert Einstein about the expansion of the universe. Einstein thought that general relativity implied that space had to be static and unchanging, but he had made a technical error regarding the differentiation of the metric (in particular, I believe he mistook the determinant of the metric for a scalar rather than a tensor density of weight 2). Friedmann didn't make this differential geometric mistake, and the cosmologies he found from the Einstein Equations were more varied in their properties - they could be expanding, or contracting, or (with the cosmological constant), static.
This video is about two-photon (gamma-gamma) physics, and how photons can interact with each other - either mediated by a passing lepton, or gravitationally via lensing, or via vacuum fluctuation pair production of vertical particles (electron-positron pair, for example). This is the so-called "box diagram" feynman diagram.
This video is about why words flip left & right (aka horizontally) in a mirror but not up & down (aka vertically). The answer has to do with specular reflection, mirrors being like windows into another world (alternate universes, just with in and out flipped!), and transparency of the things we write on.
This video is about cutting, taping, and rearranging the periodic table into the Left Step form, the Mendeleev's flower form, the cake form, the wide form, the standard form, and so on. A great holiday craft!!
This video is about the Ozma problem of distinguishing the chirality (ie left-handedness or right-handedness) of matter using weak interaction processes like beta decay (for example in uranium), or neutral kaon/k-meson decay. This is wrapped up in the phenomenon of CP violation, by which charge and parity are both violated by certain weak interaction processes - this enables antimatter to be unambiguously distinguished from matter, and left handed chirality from right handed.
This video is a collaboration with Aatish Bhatia about how to see the COVID-19 tipping point - we present a better way to graph COVID-19 coronavirus cases using a logarithmic scale in "phase space" - plotting the growth rate against the cumulative cases, rather than either of these against time.
"The electrostatic charge of N95 masks is a major contributor to their filtration efficiency, improving it at least 10-fold over uncharged fabric" (Tsai et al., Journal of Electrostatics 2002; Peter Tsai, personal communication).
This video is about how masks (whether surgical, or N95, or cloth) are counterintuitive and actually work much better epidemiologically than one might expect. Masks do double-duty, and the fraction of interactions with masks is much higher than the fraction of people wearing masks, so partially adopted, partially effective masks are able to reduce the basic reproduction number surprisingly well.
This video is about how cheap, fast, and LESS sensitive rapid antigen tests might be better for screening (& maybe surveillance) than PCR COVID tests due to the nature of contagiousness/infectiveness at various points on the viral load trajectory of symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID sars-COV-2 carriers.
This video is about how physics dictates the design of modern windmills - why they are so big, have so few blades, and have such skinny blades.
This video is about the "Kelvin wake" shape of water wakes behind boats - we talk about mach angle, dispersion, superposition of many waves, and how these all lead to the pattern of a wake. We don't get into Froude number though...
The Solution to the Windmill Paradox. This video is about the tradeoff of Windmills: the fact that the more kinetic energy you extract from the wind the slower the wind goes, the less wind you have to extract energy from, etc. How much energy is the sweet spot to extract from the wind??
This video is about using Bohmian trajectories to visualize the wavefunctions of hydrogen orbitals, rendered in 3D using custom python code in Blender.
This video is about Bell's Spaceship Paradox of Special Relativity, wherein a pair of rockets (or spacecraft) connected by a weak thread accelerate with uniform acceleration, maintaining the same separation, and the question is: does the thread break? And if so, why?
This video is about elastic and inelastic collisions in 1D, 2D and 3D - and how the collision of conservation of energy with conservation of momentum, plus a secret direction, results in a completely predetermined behavior for most collisions.
In order to make something good, you need to have the right combination of three things: Quality, Discernment and Taste. This video is about quality vs quantity, the paradox of quality, how to make good content and good videos, etc. Based on my experience over the last decade running a collaborative creative business, MinuteEarth, where we do regular internal reflection and training on the craft of science communication.
What happens if you extend a piston through a portal? Or try to sandwich a cube between two portals? That's right, it's time to explore more portal paradoxes!
A beautiful guest video by Robert Krulwich and Nate Milton
This video is about what happens if you try to pass a portal (like in the video game Portal or Portal 2) through itself - do you get a paradox? Infinite recursion? Impossibility? Contradiction? The end of the world? Collapse of the wavefunction? Ultimately it ends up looking beautiful and weird and recursive and... just watch the video :)
This video is about a better way to understand Penrose tilings (the famous tilings invented by Roger Penrose that never repeat themselves but still have some kind of order/pattern).
This video is about the physics of geosynchronous and geostationary orbits, why they exist, when they don't, when they're useful for communication/satellite TV, etc.
I was sent a magnetic guitar pick to review, so I reviewed it. Does it work? How? Why? What's the physics of electric guitar strings and pickups? Are magnets useful? Do they affect the strings? The pickups?
We are in the Golden Age of Solar Eclipses, but only for the moment. In fact, I'd argue we're already past peak solar eclipse and it's all downhill from here.
If you’re in scorching heat, or when your body is working hard and you’ve got hot, hot sweat all over, sticky and stifling - does wiping off the sweat help you cool off? Or is it better to leave it on?
The moon orbits the earth once per month, which means the moon is on the sun side of the earth every month. So... "why aren't there eclipses every month?" is a question we will answer in this video!
The sun rises in the east, the moon rises in the east, and the stars rise in the east... but solar eclipses, oddly, come from the west. If total eclipses are caused by the sun and the moon, why don't they behave like the sun and the moon?
Solar eclipses don't just happen here on earth - moons of other planets also pass between those planets and the sun, resulting in various types of solar eclipses on Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and even non-planets like Pluto, Eris and various asteroids. So, where are the best eclipses in the solar system? For that, we need a tier list.
If you take a piece of white paper into different lighting conditions, it will be an objectively different color in each situation, but our brains are clever enough to make us feel like it's still white - it's still the same piece of paper, after all. To match our experience, cameras have to do this, too, "balancing" the colors of an image so that a white object looks white under a given light, rather than some other color. And the typical unit to measure the color of a light is the Kelvin. Which is weird, because Kelvin is a unit for measuring temperature, not color. What temperature and the color in a photograph have to do with each other comes down to history and physics.
Pressure *can* melt ice - like, you only need 500 times atmospheric pressure to melt ice down to negative four degrees celsius. If you have 1000 times atmospheric pressure (like at the bottom of the Mariana trench), then you'll melt ice down to around negative nine celsius. But that's for fresh water. For salty sea water, things are different.
We think of the moon as orbiting the earth, following a spiraling trajectory as the earth itself orbits the sun. But this is wrong. Not only is the moon's orbit NOT a spiral... there's an argument that the moon actually orbits the sun, not the earth! The moon's trajectory is more like a 12-sided polygon with curved corners than it is a spiral or even a wiggly line.
November 30 Colloquium at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. Thanks to Neil Turok for inviting me to speak!
This video is uploaded to protest the SOPA/PIPA act. Preserve the free and open internet contact your representatives
At this point it isn't clear what any of us outside of Venezuela can do to help those inside the country - and this has been hard for me to stomach. Perhaps one of the best things I can do is to provide emotional support. Created by Henry Reich
This is not a normal MinutePhysics video - it's a video about patriotism, civic duty, and defending democracy in the United States of America.
This is a companion behind-the-scenes video to the main Windmill Paradox video, explaining some of the math that I couldn't get into in the main video.
