My first Q&A video! I answer 25 science questions in less than 3 minutes. If you have any other questions, I'll be looking for them in YouTube comments, Twitter, or Facebook.
New and Improved Trailer!! Just to give you an idea of what to expect...
Ever wonder why things float? Buoyancy arises from the weight of a displaced fluid, a phenomenon described by Archimedes principle.
What is and isn't "free fall" is a topic of major debate ...mostly because we can't agree on a definition. To my knowledge, every side of the debate is represented in this video.
The microwave oven is easily the best invention of the 20th century. It's easy to use and cheaper than a conventional oven. If you've ever wondered how it actually works, then you've come to the right place.
Not sure what you should be afraid of? Here's a good starter list.
Sometimes science can help you alleviate fears you might have. Here's my top-5 list of personal fears in that category.
Vectors can be a bit confusing at first. You can't hope to use them if you don't know what they are, so here's a primer. It's a bit puntastic...
Why is Nick Lucid the only one with a teleporter? This video is his answer to that question.
Ever wonder what energy really is? Me too... join me on a journey of discovery (kinda).
It's another edition of Science Lightning Round where I answer as many questions as possible in one video. This time the questions come from Google's autocomplete feature.
You don't always think about it, but not all animals have sex like humans. Sometimes the way they have sex can seem weird, gross, or even alien. This is Nick Lucid's Top-10 list of Craziest Animal Sex!!
This is just a quick primer on some astronomy words that often get misused ...and it's a bit ranty.
Entropy is a very weird and misunderstood quantity. Hopefully, this video can shed some light on the "disorder" we find ourselves in...
This is what happens when I throw shame to the wind...
How big a number can you concretely comprehend? The truth might be a lot more disappointing than you think...
This is part 1 in a 3-video series on the physics of hockey... yes, hockey the sport. Emphasis in this video is on Newton's First Law of Motion.
This is part 2 in a 3-video series on the physics of hockey... yes, hockey the sport. Emphasis in this video is on Newton's Second Law of Motion.
This is part 3 in a 3-video series on the physics of hockey... yes, hockey the sport. Emphasis in this video is on Newton's Third Law of Motion.
Yes, it has to do with Earth's tilt, but it's slightly more complicated than that. Mostly, it's about light intensity.
In Electromagnetism, they're always talking about fields... but what are they really? Standard textbook often misrepresent them, which may be part of the confusion.
Some of you were a little confused even after the last video on Entropy, so this should clear things up.
When it comes to rotation, things get really REALLY weird... so weird, in fact, that you experience things that play tricks on your perception. In this video, I demonstrate this by having fun on a merry-go-round.
A lot of people just don't get how science works, so they say things like "Well, it's just a theory." The word "theory" has a very different meaning among scientists and that's not even half the problem. The real problem is deeper.
Centrifugal force is not the only fictitious force to rear its ugly head in a rotating frame of reference. There's another one called the Coriolis force that affects moving things and it makes things even weirder.
The Amazon Rainforest is huge, so I couldn't hope to cover it in one video. This is just a list of some of the things AwkwardM got to see while she was in Ecuador's Rainforest.
The highlands of the Andes are a much different environment than the rainforest. The higher elevation makes the air dryer and cooler. As a result, there are completely different life forms there.
The Galapagos islands (off the coast of Ecuador) have some really cool organisms and a heck of a lot of history. Charles Darwin went there! It's partially responsible for the discovery of natural selection!
What made the Galapagos famous? Technically, the strange exciting organisms that lives there... but the data Charles Darwin collected there was vital to the discovery of natural selection and the start of evolutionary theory.
In 1905, Einstein came up with his famous equation showing a relationship between energy and mass... but what does it really mean? The answer might surprise you.
So most of us know that gravity comes from mass and that it's always attractive... but what the heck is the mechanism behind it?! This is the simplest I can make the answer without just being wrong.
I've been thinking a lot about quantum physics lately, so I thought I'd give you a list of the top 4 craziest concepts I've come across.
One of the major consequences of Einstein's special theory of relativity is that time is not absolute. The passage of time depends on the observer, so we all have our own clocks. It might seem weird, but if you stop to think about it, it's clear it can't be any other way.
The uncertainty principle was suggested by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. His version was only about position and momentum, but it's much broader than that. In fact, it happens anytime you model waves.
Thank you all so much for being part of this community. I look forward to future growth. You're all my fellow crazies.
Lightning is a static charge phenomenon that occurs all over the Earth. It's highly dangerous (sometimes deadly). I try to shed some light on where it comes from, how powerful it is, and how to possibly survive.
Light is the only thing we've observed to travel at the speed of light, though there are some theoretical particles that do the same... But why does it go so fast? and why can't everything go that fast? Watch to find out.
There's not much to say about pressure, but here's a quick definition and some facts. CRAZY QUICKY TIME!
Dark matter tends to be something which is misused a lot in sci-fi. It's mostly ordinary stuff, but that doesn't make it any less important.
Double-slit experiments have been around for over 200 years. They've been the standard for drawing the line between wave and particle. Unfortunately, since Feynman used it as a thought experiment on quantum physics in the 1960s, things got weird.
You can do math all day, but if you're not interpreting your results, then you're not doing science. In this video, you'll find the three most widely accepted interpretations of quantum physics: Ensemble, Many-Worlds, and Copenhagen. It could turn out that none of them are correct, but it's the best we've got so far.
Why is there a vacuum in space? I answer this seemly simple question with complex subtleties you never could have imagined.
What if I told you that all optical phenomena were actually the same thing? In this video, I justify that bold statement with some diagrams and maybe just a smidgen of math... maybe.
Sci-fi often shows people just walking around in a spaceship even though they should be floating. The stories that happen now or in the NEAR future doesn't have the luxury of using some mystical "artificial gravity" device, so they need a more realistic explanation. The common method is by rotating the spaceship, but that can cause problems if you're not careful. What kind of problems?! That's what this video is all about!
Have you ever been making s'mores and wondered how you could do science while enjoying something so delicious? Well, have I got some good news for you! If you make them in the microwave, you can measure the speed of light and it's pretty exciting.
There's an old paradox about fitting a 6 ft pole in a 5 ft barn, but a 5 ft barn isn't much of a "barn," so we'll call it a "shed." It's called the pole-barn paradox or the ladder paradox and it involves going REALLY fast. However, like all paradoxes, it's just a matter of letting go of assumptions.
You may have heard temperature is just the kinetic energy of molecules, but that's a subtle lie. In this video, Nick Lucid explains those subtlies in the only way he knows how: CRAZY!
Lots of people know about absolute zero, the lowest possible temperature... but is there a hottest possible temperature? Well, maybe.
If you haven't already figured it out from the title, the Science Asylum is now on Patreon. If you're into financially supporting your favorite creators and we fit that description, now you can! If not, that's cool too. No pressure.
If you fill a bucket with water and swing it over your head, why does the water stay inside the bucket? In this video, we answer that very question! Watch for a thorough but crazy analysis.
It's pretty well known that matter annihilates when it comes into contact with antimatter. Unfortunately, not enough people know why this happens, what its consequences are, and what it means in the grand scheme of the universe. That’s what this video is all about!
It's very common language to say "I need to charge my battery," but that's a total misnomer. Your battery ALWAYS has the same amount of charge in it. This video should set the record straight!
In Star Wars: A New Hope, Han Solo brags that his ship made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs. In this video, I examine that statement in detail using both real-world and FICTIONAL physics!
Here are some basic facts about black holes... but in the form of answering questions... so they're FAQs, not facts :-)
It's kinda weird that glass is transparent for ALL visible wavelengths of light. This video explains how that's possible without being inconsistent with other concepts. There is a lot of B.S. about this out there on the internet, so beware!
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Chemists will tell you that bonds contain energy. In an episode of SciShow Talk Show (link below), Derek from Veritasium says atoms are bonded because they LOSE energy. Derek is definitely closer to the truth, but we take it a step further in this video.
A lot of people think you fly straight away from the center if you fall off a spinning merry-go-round, but that couldn't be further from the truth! In this video, I not only explain, but also DEMONSTRATE what actually happens.
All of us are familiar with what light does for us and what devices create it. Not many of us know how light is actually made or what it even is. That's what this video is for!
YouTube is giving me trouble with comments, so I thought I'd answer some through video. Maybe I'll have better luck reaching people this way.
Ever wonder how many alien races there might be in the our galaxy? Well, there's a simple way to estimate it and it's the topic of this video.
In basic chemistry, they tell you there are only a few types of bonds between atoms. Not only is this false, but putting bonds into categories can be dangerous... for your understanding.
This year's 3-video series is on Relativity. By the end, we'll get all the way up to Einstein's theory of gravity, but first we need to do a little background. This video starts in 1632 with Galileo.
This year's 3-video series is on Relativity. By the end, we'll get all the way up to Einstein's theory of gravity, but first we need to do a little background. This video mainly focuses on a problem created in the 1800s that Einstein had to fix.
This year's 3-video series is on Relativity. Einstein (and his friends) came to some pretty crazy conclusions about gravity. By the end of this video, you'll have no choice but to come to the same conclusions.
This is the comment responses video for my 3-video series on Relativity. Lots of great questions!
I've had a few requests for longer videos. Unless I change the format, this is what it would be like if I made 10 minute videos. Any constructive feedback is appreciated :-)
Here's a little primer on spacetime diagrams to finish off our journey through Einstein's relativity. We need to get back to other topics.
We're finally answering the age old question about the Earth and its spin. A physics teacher might have told you it's inertia, but the deeper answer is so much cooler!
A lot of physicists talk about "information" and just assume you'll figure out what it means by context... probably because they don't actually understand it. Hopefully, this video will fix all that! We'll talk about how physical information fixes a few relativity problems as well as how it relates to entropy and digital information.
In 1915, Emmy Noether was invited by David Hilbert and Albert Einstein to the University of Gottingen to solve a problem they were having with their general theory of relativity. While solving their problem, she discovered something deeply fundamental about the universe. I wanted to take some time during Women's History Month to honor her.
We've all played with magnets before watching them attract or repel via magnetic force. In this video, I make the bold claim that magnetic force doesn't actually exist. It's an illusion.
Building a Death Star is beyond the capabilities of present day humans, but could the galactic empire in Star Wars have done it? In this video, we answer that to the best of our ability.
Some of the more philosophical among us wonder if we're living in a universe-sized simulation. In this video, we look into the possibility by first covering the kind of things humans need to simulate and why.
A few months ago there was all this hype about the discovery of gravitational waves. Why was it such a big deal? What are they? How are they made? Where did these waves come from? These are all question we try to answer in this video.
Black holes aren't as dangerous to most of the universe as sci-fi would have you believe. They don't "suck" things in. They're only a problem if you get too close, so what would it be like to get too close? What would it be like to fall into a black hole?
Back in 1900 CE, Max Planck invented a natural system of units that he hopes would be the most universal. How universal are they? What does it mean for them to be "natural"? How are they defined? Why are they used? These are all questions answered in this video.
The average human male is 5.6 ft tall and the average human female is 5.2 ft tall. Why is this? Could we be a different size? How much bigger or smaller could we be and still be human? All of these are questions we try to answer in this video.
In the last video, we looked at the biomechanics of why we're only a few feet (couple meters) tall. Now, we ask something much deeper: Why do we have any size at all? It calls into question the very nature of space itself and we're diving head first into the madness.
One of the most fundamental ideas physics students are introduced to is "inertia." Unfortunately, many students misunderstand the concept. This video should set the record straight.
Why do some people have such a hard time accepting ideas like global warming, evolution, geologic time, or the big bang theory? These scientific ideas are some of the most supported, yet (to some) they seem completely ridiculous. Besides religious conviction, there are actually other factors at play in the human brain.
Contrary to popular belief, airplanes do not fly because of Bernoulli's Principle. It's actually much simpler than that.
All 8 planets in our solar system seem to orbit in roughly the same plane (give or take a few degrees). Why don't they just orbit whichever way they want? Why did the solar system turn out so... flat?
Of all the things we can actually see (directly), we say light is the only one that doesn't have mass. Is this true? How is this possible if it has energy?
A lot of people treat order-of-magnitude estimates like regular rounding. If you do that, then you're doing it wrong. Let's set the record straight. Also, this is the 100th video on this channel! WOOO!!!
They say the Sun is powered by nuclear fusion. What is nuclear fusion? How does it work? Why does it take something like the Sun to do it? Let's find the answers!
Astronomers and astrophysics say we know a lot about stars. We can even make predictions about what stars used to look like and what they'll look like in the future. How is that possible if they live millions of times longer than humans?
There is a very common debate over the nature of math. Is it something that exists as part of the universe that we slowly "discover" or is it something we make up to try and explain our crazy world? After a lot of careful thought, this video is my answer.
You have heard that light only goes at 300,000,000 m/s in the vacuum and that it goes slower in materials. Is that actually true? Maybe not. It depends...
You might feel like you've got a good grasp on how far away the Moon is, but you probably don't. It looks a lot closer than it actually is. In fact, most things in outer space look closer than they actually are. You might even be overwhelmed by the true vastness and emptiness of space.
You might have heard someone say the universe is "flat" or is "infinite." What does that mean? More importantly, is it true? Do we know for sure? Find out in this installment of mind-melting physics.
Fine. The universe is expanding, but into what? That depends on whether the universe is infinite or not. Either way though, it's probably not the answer you're expecting.
When the Moon is near the horizon, it seems bigger than when it's high in the sky. This is an illusion and humans have been trying to figure it out for millennia.
In the previous video, we talked about the Moon illusion. Let's answer some comments.
What is the Science Asylum? A educational channel run by a crazy scientist with the assistance of a bunch of his clones. Here's a sample of the madness.
Cosmological redshift was our first clue the universe was expanding. A century ago, Edwin Hubble discovered galaxies outside our own supercluster are all moving away from us. But how do we get from redshift to an expanding universe? That's the tricky part and most people get it wrong.
If stars are so far away, then how do we know what they're made of? It's absorption spectrum! Even our closest star, the Sun, is way too hot to take a sample, so we have to rely on what the light can tell us.
Believe it or not, we can predict how the universe will end. It just involves a bunch of general relativity and some cosmological data like regular matter, dark matter, dark energy, and curvature.
An infinite universe, cosmological redshift, cosmic microwave background, spacetime diagrams, and dark energy! Here are the comment responses to our 4-part cosmology series.
It's often said that "magnetic force cannot do work." This video is my challenge to this long-taught physics rule.
A while back, I made a video about how magnetism from an electric current is due to special relativity. After several comments about missing information, I thought I'd do a follow-up video.
Contrary to popular belief, it's not radiation pressure from light because that's far too weak. We need to think about pressure gradients and air vortices in fluid dynamics.
From orbital mechanics to quantum mechanics, this video explains why we must accept a world of particles based on probabilities, statistics, and chance. Electrons, protons, and neutrons don't behave the same way that planets and billiard balls do.
The different sections of the periodic table of elements are governed by electron orbitals and quantum spin. Those orbitals, as you'd expect, are the result of a quantum mechanical wave function. Here's a glimpse into how that works.
White dwarfs are a type of stellar corpse, the mass left over when fusion stops in a star. They would collapse on themselves under gravity if it wasn't for quantum mechanics, the Pauli exclusion principle, and electron degeneracy pressure. Here's how they work.
When a dying star is too massive to leave behind a white dwarf and not massive enough to leave behind a black hole, you get a neutron star (sometimes a pulsar). It's a very compact clump of neutrons surrounded by a very strong magnetic field. These things are crazy!!
Small particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons are often shown to be spinning on an axis like a planet, but this simply cannot be the case. Quantum mechanical spin is actually an intrinsic property like charge, so how does that work?
It's going to be a lot easier to colonize Mars if we can terraform it first. The first step would be to give Mars a thicker atmosphere, which means it will need a magnetic field, or magnetosphere, to protect it. Here's how we would do that.
Many of us have polarized sunglasses, but how does an optical polarizer actually block light? It has to do with the polarization of electromagnetic waves and the vibration of atoms in transparent solids.
Have you ever thought about what kind of optics those cheap plastic glasses use to make movies 3D? It has to do with circular polarization of electromagnetic waves (otherwise known as light). The physics is actually pretty cool.
A photon is a purely quantum mechanical object representing the smallest piece of energy (or quanta) for light. Every quantum particle is a packet of energy though, so how do we tell photons apart from electrons, quarks, and neutrinos?
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How can the universe be flat, spherical, or hyperbolic? Do we expand with the universe? Why do we look like we're at the center of the universe? These are 3 common questions about cosmology people almost always misunderstand. 20% off the first 200: https://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum/
Classical physics says the universe is predictable, but quantum mechanics says the universe is inherently random. Which is it? The answer lies in the nature of probability. 20% off the first 72: https://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum/
In classical physics, gravity is a force that pulls objects toward the center of the Earth. In general relativity, gravity is the result of curved spacetime and geodesics, but what exactly does that mean?
We live in a universe where things like length, distance, and time are all relative and that can lead to strange paradoxes if you're not careful. Thankfully, Einstein's special and general relativity have rules to obey and useful tools like space-time diagrams to help you avoid such problems.
The twins paradox is easily the most famous paradoxes of all time. Using spacetime diagrams and the rules of relativity, we can show the paradox only happens because people are being lazy with special relativity. http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
Light goes so fast that it broke our classical understanding of how speed works. We can fix our understanding with a little relativity and a space-time diagram, but you have to let go of any preconceived notions you might have about motion.
The concept of a space-time seems to suggest both the past and the future already exist and that the freedom of choice is an illusion. However, a deeper look into cause and effect, locality, light cones, and infinitesimals still leaves an opening for freewill.
Truly understanding black holes requires the curved space-time of general relativity.
How does your phone always know exactly where you are? Navigation apps and GPS units use a variety of techniques to find your location and some of it even depends on Einstein's relativity.
Astrophysics says the universe began in a "big bang" billions of years ago, but how do we know that? One of the trickiest things to measure in cosmology is the age of the universe. Check out Brilliant: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
There are many misconceptions that have developed around quantum mechanics. I'm here to correct them with a discussion of wave functions, probability, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
The concept of "mass" shows up a lot of different places: Newton's Laws of Motion, Inertia, Gravity, Einstein's Relativity, Quantum Mechanics. Is it relativistic mass or just rest mass? These confusions are everywhere. Let's clarify.
Just about every scientific discipline talks about energy. There are many different types: potential, kinetic, thermal, chemical, and even nuclear. It's behavior has consequences that affect the very nature of matter and space-time itself, so what is it exactly?
Black holes aren't just a product of general relativity, but also require quantum mechanics. In this video, we'll take a look at how the Pauli exclusion principle and Heisenberg uncertainty principle apply to black holes. Making a black hole is actually quite difficult.
Black holes are the ultimate trap of the universe, but not because of escape velocity. To understand what's really happening, we need to delve into general relativity, space-time curvature, gravity, and causality.
Inverse square laws show up everywhere from the brightness of electromagnetic waves (light) to the strength of gravitational and electric fields of force. Let's take a historical journey all the way from Kepler to Gauss to see why this is such an important concept.
What is electric charge? What is the electromagnetic field? We can understand both at the same time through Gauss's law! Join us for a visual introduction to electricity.
Magnetism has been a human fascination for thousands of years, but where does it come from? Some of it comes from the motion of charge, called electromagnetism. Some even the spin angular momentum of electrons in quantum mechanics. Let me show you how these are one in the same.
There are many solar system models out there, but I've never seen one to this big before. Let's explore what the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune look like on a scale of 52,800,000 to one. Spoiler Alert: It's huge!
When charge moves, we call it electric current, but the word current is usually reserved for things like water flows. Does electric current really work like that? Electrons are quantum particles, so we have to be careful.
People say that solar power is the future of renewable energy, but how do solar panels work anyway? Join us as we explore the world of semiconductors using chemistry. http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
Most of our energy isn't generated chemically like in batteries or by solar panels. Whether, it's coal, gas, nuclear, wind, or water power; it's generated by magnetic induction and governed by Faraday's law from electrodynamics.
Most sources talk about Schwarzschild black holes, but those don't spin. Most are what we call Kerr black holes, or rotating black holes, surrounded by a region called an ergosphere. The spacetime around them is not only stretched, but also twisted, leading to some strange phenomena.
Whether or not pi exists has some very deep implications about circles, matter, computing, space-time, gravity, and quantum physics. Let's see if we can tackle some of them in honor of pi day!
Science Asylum is a proud partner of Dollar Shave Club. http://www.dollarshaveclub.com/scienceasylum
It's often said that light is an electromagnetic wave, a disturbance in electric and magnetic fields, but what does that mean? How are they made? Let's take a deeper look at electrodynamics and this history behind the discovery to see if we can find an answer.
When physics students first learn about Newton's law and momentum, they get the impression that it's all about mass. If that's true, how can mass-less light have momentum? It's because mass isn't actually required.
Color is a property that belongs to light (i.e. electromagnetic waves). We only think objects are colored because of the light they reflect and scatter. In fact, some of the colors you see are an illusion created by your eyes and brain. What colors are real and which ones are fake? Let's find out.
We might not have unified electrodynamics until 1865, but we've known light was a wave since the original double-slit experiment in 1801. Let's talk about diffraction and wave interference.
Do quantum particles actually know if they're being watched like the double-slit experiment suggests? Does the delayed-choice quantum eraser finally prove this? No, but let's ask some better questions and see what's going on.
Check out Brilliant for 20% off: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
Go to http://audible.com/thescienceasylum or text 'thescienceasylum' to 500 500 to get started today. Is energy always conserved? Well, Noether's theorem in combination with Lagrangian mechanics and general relativity tells us that isn't true in general.
Gradients, a form of the del operator, are a way to measure change in field strength across one, two, or even three dimensional space. They come up all over physics: fluid dynamics, conservative forces, electrodynamics, cosmology. They're the reason that anything ever happens.
Maxwell's equation are written in the language of vector calculus, specifically divergence and curl. Understanding how the electromagnetic field works requires we also understand that language. Unfortunately, symbols can be ugly, so let's try some dynamic visuals instead.
Electrodynamics (electricity and magnetism) is governed by Maxwell's equations and the Lorentz force law, but that left it a little broken. It would take Albert Einstein inventing special relativity to fix it. If magnets are based on motion and motion is relative, how does that work?
The most mysterious aspect of quantum mechanics is the wave function. What does it have to do with probability and statistics? Let's find out. Also, check out Brilliant for 20%: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
Electric and magnetic fields were considered the end-all-be-all of electromagnetism. However, in 1959, two physicists (Aharonov and Bohm) proposed a quantum mechanical experiment that shows electric and magnetic potentials are actually more real.
Lots of sources and videos explain photosynthesis through the lens of biology, but what does a physicist see as important? Can a physicist explain a biology topic? How deep will their explanation go? Let's find out.
Mirrors are weird. To truly understand them, we'll need not only ray and wave optics, but also photons, wave functions, probability, and quantum mechanics. Brilliant for 20% off: https://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
What's the difference between a mirror and a piece of paper? The answer requires an understanding of surface texture, but also light scattering, Huygens principle, and electrical conductivity. Optics is metal!
A lot of optical illusions can be explained by Fermat's principle of least time, but why does light obey it? On a fundamental level, it all comes down to quantum mechanics, specifically quantum optics, where we use the famous "Feynman path integral formulation" to explain light through photons.
We measure geologic time millions of years and cosmic time in the billions. These numbers seem impossible to understand, so let's get some perspective with a different unit: the galactic year.
The term "tensor" is often misunderstood. Let's figure out what they are through vector examples like velocity, angular momentum, the stress tensor, and the electromagnetic tensor. Brilliant for 20% off: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
There are bunch of videos out there explaining why the sky is blue, but let's go a little deeper into the optics. Why does color matter? What's a vibrational resonance? What's actually happening on the subatomic level?
There are red, orange, yellow, blue, and even white stars, but no green or purple stars. The reason comes down to chromaticity and the optics of black body sources. Brilliant for 20% off: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
The Sun's core is 15 million °C (27 million °F), which is hot enough to turn gas into a plasma. But thermodynamics isn't enough to explain nuclear fusion at those temperatures. It needs quantum tunneling!
In physics, it can sometimes help to imagine a challenging problem as easier problem we already know how to solve. What if you're free falling from outer space? What if you're falling through a tunnel drilled through the Earth? Brilliant for 20% off: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
The behavior of spacetime is described by Einstein's equation (i.e. Einstein's field equations) from General Relativity. To understand how elastic it is, we need to delve into the main equation of elasticity, Hooke's law, and see how it compares.
Measuring the curvature of a space takes parallel transport and the Riemann curvature tensor (General Relativity). Let's explore this using Flatland and Lineland, an old tool involving lower-dimensional spaces. Brilliant for 20% off: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
In special and general relativity, we imagine time as just another dimension of space in something called "spacetime." Unfortunately, this picture leads to questions about determinism and free will. Is that really how it works? What does the concept of spacetime actually say about the universe and about time?
Electric charge is both a spacetime invariant and conserved over time. To understand why, we'll need to dive deep into it's connection to the electromagnetic field through Noether's theorem and quantum mechanics. Brilliant for 20% off: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
We like to imagine of gravitational orbits as the conic sections: circles, ellipses, etc. That's only for two-body problems though. Let's take a look at three-body problems (and beyond) using Newtonian mechanics as well as General Relativity. How weird can orbits actually get?
Einstein's general relativity says gravity is spacetime curvature, but what does that mean? Let's take a look at how gravitational time dilation results in an effect that looks a lot like gravity. The flow of time brings mass together.
The cosmic microwave background, or CMB, is the oldest light in the universe. It's a remnant of the hot dense cosmic past. How was it made? What did it used to look like? And, frankly, why should we care about it? Brilliant for 20% off: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
Special relativity is full of weirdness like length contraction and time dilation. It's the result of something called a Lorentz transform. It's almost exclusively done algebraically, but it makes way more sense if you do it geometrically. Brilliant for 20% off: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
The first 100 people to go to https://www.blinkist.com/scienceasylum are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You'll also get 25% off if you want the full membership.
A black hole is matter and/or light crammed into such a tiny volume that nothing can escape. But, shortly after the big bang, the observable universe was that small. How did it escape?! Brilliant for 20% off: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
We're made of matter, which means we experience time. But what if we were made of something timeless like light instead? What would the universe be like for us? Brilliant for 20% off: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
Visuals of quantum orbitals are always so static. What happens when an electron transitions? A current must flow to conserve the probability. What does that look like?!
I try to teach my wife (biologist) about the basics of quantum mechanics: wave functions, Schrodinger's equation, superpositions, and the measurement problem. Brilliant for 20% off: http://brilliant.org/ScienceAsylum
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From Copenhagen to pilot waves and many worlds, interpreting quantum mechanics is difficult. In this video, I try to explain them all to my wife. Let's see how I did.
Near the end of the Sun's life, it will expand into a red giant, but will it destroy Earth? To find out, we need to delve into stellar evolution, fusion, and hydrostatic equilibrium.
Whenever I play tabletop game Farkle, I'm surprise by how often the high-point rolls occur. The probabilities don't seem to correlate with score. Let's try and fix it.
Mars and Venus are both in the habitable zone, but their climates are not human-friendly. What if they formed in opposite locations? Would either one be habitable then? To find out, we'll need atmospheric science and a little help from NASA.
Nothing can escape black holes, yet somehow they can lose mass by emitting Hawking radiation?! To understand why, we'll need to combine quantum field theory with general relativity.
They say you can fit 1.3 million Earths in the Sun... but according to sphere packing math, my own Python code, a scale model; that can't be true. Let's find out how many Earth's actually fit in the Sun.
In cosmology, we can use general relativity to map out several possible futures and pasts. Most have an infinite future, but a finite past. How can that be possible? Maybe it isn't.
Black holes seem like the ultimate absorbers, which would make you think they're absolute zero. Hawking radiation tells a different story though. It's a thermal spectrum!
Contrary to popular belief, bathroom scales do not measure weight. Weight isn't a (Newtonian) force we can measure directly. What do scales actually measure? Let's find out with an experiment.
Electric current has to obey certain rules, like taking the path of least resistance. But when rules are that simple, they tend to be a little wrong. Let's see if we can write a better one.
Dark matter is 84% of the matter in the universe and it single-handedly explains a lot of stuff: cluster motion, galactic rotation, gravitational lensing, and the CMB. We have piles of irrefutable evidence. Let's go through it, shall we.
Alternating current is kind of wild. Electric charge drifting back and forth, governed by wave mechanics. But what if I told you there's a better way using imaginary numbers and the complex plane? It's called a phasor diagram.
We like the think the Earth has a lot of texture: mountains, valleys, trenches, rock, grass, water. But is human touch sensitive enough to detect these features? Let's find out with some scale models.
We know for sure that dark matter exists. The question remains: What is it made of? Is it rogue planets? Black holes? Neutron stars? A bunch of tiny particles like neutrinos? Let's look at the likelihood of each.
How we understand time with clocks is fundamentally different than the passage of cosmic time and this is mainly due to our time zones. Let's take a look at the history of timekeeping to see how these two concepts of time coexist in our lives.
A common phrase in quantum mechanics is: "The electron is in multiple states at the same time." But it's actually a lie. Quantum particles like electrons are never in multiple states at the same time. It's just that most quantum states don’t make sense to us.
Capacitors are tiny physical gaps in a circuit. How does that even work? Well, if we analyze capacitors on a deep level, we see they're almost breathing energy.
Tidal locking is when the rotation of a planet or moon is equal to its orbital period. It's actually quite common in our solar system and likely elsewhere. How does that actually happen though?
Where are all the aliens?! This is the essence to the Fermi Paradox. It's most popular solution is the "Great Filter." What is the obstacle that life and/or intelligent species are unlikely to survive? Let's discuss.
Is the speed of light finite? Or is it infinite? That depends on what geometry you're using and how you define speed. It's infinite in hyperbolic geometry, which is the proper geometry for spacetime.
Entangled particles are the quintessential quantum object. They simply can't be explained by classical physics, but do they really communicate faster than light? In a way, yes.
Infrared light can allow you to see many normally invisible things, but can it allow you to see through walls? Let's take a look at the flow of heat using a thermal camera and also using a simulation based on the heat equation.
Supermassive black holes are pretty mind blowing. Some of them are larger than our entire solar system. The problem is, the universe isn't old enough for them to exist.
Bell's spaceship paradox from special relativity has been tormenting physicists for decades. I try to settle the debate once and for all with the use of spacetime diagrams.
About 107 years ago, Albert Einstein and David Hilbert published general relativity. It's the most modern model of gravity we have, but university courses on it are difficult to find. This video is a self-study guide.
Polarized sunglasses allow you to see the orientation of light. That combined with birefringence can help you see patterns of stress inside materials. But how does that work exactly?
The Star Trek transporter uses the concept of quantum teleportation, which should be physically possible. I asked other YouTubers whether or not they'd use one and we discussed the philosophical implications.
At about 9.6 billion light years, our intuition about angular diameter breaks down. Galaxies start getting larger the more distant they are. Let's find out why.
The circuit inside a microwave oven is a half-wave doubler, an incredibly inefficient design. How does it work? Why do we put them in microwaves?!
Ancient humans really wanted Earth to be the center of the universe. Geocentrism wasn't a mistake. Ptolemy wasn't that far off from the truth. He just gave Earth too much importance.
Schrödinger's equation governs the behavior of tiny quantum particles by treating them as wave functions. But is Schrödinger's equation actually a wave equation? Maybe not.
Have you ever wondered what kind of astronomical object brown dwarfs are? They're too big to be a planet, yet too small to be a star. They're like the cosmic middle child. Here's everything you need to know about brown dwarfs.
Is the multiverse possible? Yes! In fact, there are 3 different kinds: Many Worlds, Eternal Inflation, and Infinite Repeating Space. They come from our most fundamental theories: general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Somewhere between 1926 and 1950, we gave up the concept of particles in favor of quantum fields. In this video, I explain the motivations for that to a non-physicist: my wife.
We all know Saturn has planetary rings, but other planets have them too. Where they come from? How are gravity and tidal forces involved? What is the Roche limit? Let's find out.
Muons are generated in the upper atmosphere due to incoming cosmic rays. Many of those muons reach the ground even though they only last an average 2.2 microseconds. How is that possible?
You might have heard that black holes suck, like literally. It's certainly a funny joke, but it isn't true. Black holes aren’t even that weird if you're far enough away. I correct this and other misconceptions with this video.
Black holes look really weird because of the way light bends around them. This video explains how that all works and why black hole images look the way they do.
The James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, is the greatest telescope ever constructed. But between ballooning budgets, a decade and a half of launch delays, and a huge controversy over the name; getting this thing into space was a nightmare.
We can't measure the distance to astronomical objects directly, so we have to be creative. That's why we need the cosmic distance ladder. It's a serious of techniques we use to calculate astronomical distances indirectly.
With all the YouTubers quitting lately, you might be worried about who is next. Well, it ain't me! I do to make some changes though.
Tachyons travel faster than light, so do they go backward in time? Well, maybe, but they probably don't exist. Here's why.
Massive stars end their existence in a blaze of glory called a supernova. What are those last moments like? And why does it end in a supernova?
The big bang is the model that describes the birth and evolution of the universe. But where did the term come from? What does it actually mean?
Believe it not, Einstein originally thought the universe was static. It would take Alexander Friedmann to correct him. Here are the Friedmann equations, explained simply.
Sirius is the brightest star in the sky and visible from most of the planet. We've been staring at it for 1000s of years, but the more we learn about it, the weirder it gets.
White dwarfs are made of degenerate matter, so compact there isn't room for atoms to exist. And, believe it or not, we discovered that using a model from a completely different context.
Quantum spinors are abstract mathematical entities, so people often seek analogies to make more sense of them. Here are the best two analogies I've been able to find.
The Stern-Gerlach experiment was the first detection of quantum spin, except we didn't know it for 4 years. At the time, we didn't even know quantum spin was a thing.
E=mc² is probably the most famous equation ever, and it's repeatedly misunderstood. It's not even the whole equation!
