bike physics

A two-minute minutephysics video explaining why turning a bicycle requires first steering briefly the other way. It covers counter-steering and balance with slow-motion footage and 3D animation.

A short minutephysics video explaining why bicycles stay upright. It looks at gyroscopic precession, head angle and centre of mass, and shows that bikes self-steer toward the direction they lean.

Not Just Bikes explains why upright Dutch-style bicycles are comfortable and practical, and why they are rare outside the Netherlands.

Veritasium explains why bicycles are stable, arguing that gyroscopic effects are not the answer. The video shows countersteering and an experiment where riders blocked from steering the opposite way cannot turn.

Not Just Bikes argues that winter is not what stops Canadians cycling, using Oulu, Finland as proof that safe, well-maintained cycling infrastructure enables year-round biking despite harsh weather.

Not Just Bikes explains how an electric bakfiets (Dutch cargo bike) replaced the family car after a move back to Canada, saving thousands of dollars. It shows how much it can carry, including kids and groceries.

Veritasium explains how trees lift water from roots to the top of tall trunks, using transpiration pull and the negative pressure that liquid water can sustain. It explains why trees do not need pumps or valves.

PBS Space Time, together with It's Okay to be Smart and PBS Eons, asks how a universe drifting toward disorder produced something as complex as life. It presents the idea that the laws of physics, through thermodynamics, may actually favor the emergence of life.

Veritasium's explainer on entropy, presented as one of physics' most important and least understood concepts. It uses examples such as heat engines and the sun's energy flowing through the Earth.

Destin of Smarter Every Day films a cat falling in high-speed slow motion to show how cats right themselves in midair, and introduces the physics behind it.

Veritasium investigates whether a wind-powered vehicle can travel directly downwind faster than the wind, driving the Blackbird craft himself. The video explains the physics behind a claim some physics professors dispute.

Veritasium recounts a $10,000 bet with a UCLA physics professor over whether a vehicle can travel downwind faster than the wind. He presents the professor's reasoning and demonstrations, including one without aerodynamics.

Two Minute Papers covers a paper on speeding up fluid and smoke simulation with convolutional networks. It contrasts the approach with earlier regression forest methods.

Not Just Bikes visits Paris to see how Mayor Anne Hidalgo's policies are turning it into a '100% cyclable' city. It looks at the changes that took space from cars for bikes and people.

Not Just Bikes explains Dutch bicycle-only roads, which let people travel long distances in and out of cities with almost no car interaction. It shows how this changes cycling from a chore into something enjoyable.

An animated visualization of basic quantum mechanics using a free particle, with simulations based on the actual equations. It covers waves, particles, and how measurement collapses the wavefunction.

PBS Space Time explains the Standard Model Lagrangian, the single equation encapsulating the particle physics theory, and visualizes what its terms mean.

A four-minute Not Just Bikes comparison of grocery shopping in Amsterdam versus car-centric North America, arguing that frequent small fresh-food trips beat bulk shopping. It ties this to land use and reduced food waste.

The first video in Not Just Bikes' Strong Towns series explains the financial instability of North American cities, based on Strong Towns research. It argues that low-density suburban growth costs more to maintain than it brings in.

Not Just Bikes explains missing middle housing, such as duplexes, townhouses and small apartment buildings. The video argues that zoning in the US and Canada has made these options almost illegal.

Not Just Bikes argues that people in walkable, bikeable Dutch cities stay healthy because exercise is built into daily life, which he calls the gym of life. It contrasts this with car-dependent cities that require deliberate workouts.

Not Just Bikes compares the same cycling trip to a hardware store in Calgary and in Amsterdam, using a 'plus 1 minus 2' format. It shows how street design shapes how safe and practical cycling is.

A minutephysics explainer on why the planets orbit in a flat plane. It shows how conserved angular momentum flattens a collapsing cloud of matter into a disk.

A minutephysics video explaining why a piano cannot be perfectly tuned, comparing equal temperament with just intonation and the math of harmonics.

A minutephysics explainer on the twins paradox in special relativity. It shows why the traveling twin ends up younger and how acceleration resolves the paradox.

minutephysics, in collaboration with the US Census Bureau, explains differential privacy and why the 2020 census adds noise to protect individuals' data. It walks through how statistics can leak private information.

Minutephysics compares how efficiently different processes convert mass to energy per E=mc^2, from fire and fission to fusion, antimatter and black holes, which can convert a large fraction of mass to energy.

A three-minute minutephysics video on the orbital mechanics of why crashing into the Sun takes far more energy than leaving the solar system.

Not Just Bikes looks at traffic in the Bahamas to show that a small country can be just as car-centric as a big one. He ties it to land use, car dependence and how dedicated transit lanes help.

A snarky, comedic video essay from Climate Town, with a guest appearance by Not Just Bikes, arguing that American suburban sprawl and single-family zoning are financially and environmentally unsustainable. It covers how zoning rules shape housing and what viewers can do locally, such as attending zoning meetings.

Veritasium explores why energy is not conserved in general relativity, using Emmy Noether's theorem linking symmetries to conservation laws. Physicists interviewed explain energy loss in an expanding universe.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining the Fermilab Muon g-2 results and why a discrepancy with the Standard Model prediction could point to new physics.

3Blue1Brown, in collaboration with minutephysics, introduces the math of superposition and quantum states using polarized light. It builds up the quantum behavior of photons as a simple counting and probability problem.

A short clip of Richard Feynman explaining how a train stays on its tracks, through the conical shape of wheels and how it handles curves without differentials.

A short clip from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman explains how a train stays on the track. He covers the geometry of tapered wheels that steer the train back toward the center of the rails.

PBS Space Time explains how general relativity permits warp drive in principle and covers recent theoretical advances toward solving the negative energy problem.

Not Just Bikes contrasts typical car-dependent North American business parks with one near the airport in the Netherlands that works for driving, cycling and transit. It looks at how the design makes commuting easier.

A short Not Just Bikes video on the 1960s plans (Plan Jokinen) to cut highways through Amsterdam to accommodate cars. It shows how radically different the city would look had they succeeded.

Not Just Bikes explains why living in a dense, bikeable Dutch city sharply reduced his family's environmental footprint and improved quality of life. It is a collaboration that continues on Climate Town.

Not Just Bikes tours Houten, a Dutch town designed around cycling, explaining how its layout makes most trips by bike safe and easy. It also promotes a book about the town.