classical

A rap battle in which John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek debate the causes of boom and bust, stimulus, and bailouts. It was produced by Econstories to teach the two schools of thought.

PBS Space Time argues that the speed of light is better understood as the speed of causality, the universal limit on how fast cause and effect propagate. Light travels at that speed because it is massless, but the limit itself is a property of spacetime.

Veritasium explains why the one-way speed of light has never been measured, only the round-trip speed, since measuring it requires synchronized clocks that assume the answer. It explores the implications for relativity.

ScienceClic explains why the rubber sheet analogy for general relativity is misleading and offers a new visualization that includes the curvature of time and shows gravity as motion through curved spacetime.

Veritasium explains magnetism as a consequence of special relativity. Length contraction of moving charges makes a current in a wire attract or repel a nearby moving charge.

Veritasium argues that electric energy is carried by fields around the wires rather than by electrons moving through them, using a thought experiment with a large circuit.

Mike Pound explains the discrete cosine transform and how it underpins JPEG compression. It is part two of Computerphile's JPEG series.

AlphaPhoenix uses a custom high-speed measurement setup to watch voltage waves travel down wires and split at a fork. It answers how electricity knows where to go and how quickly that process happens.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

3Blue1Brown visualizes Feynman's lecture on the refractive index, explaining why light appears to slow down in glass and why the effect depends on color. It builds the idea from waves produced by oscillating charges in the material.

Veritasium explains, with expert input, that in general relativity gravity is not a force and objects follow straight paths through curved spacetime, including why standing on the ground means you are accelerating.

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 explains Noether's theorem: conservation laws such as energy and momentum are consequences of deeper symmetries. It also covers why those laws hold only under certain conditions.

A PBS clip in which Richard Feynman explains the strange nature of light and electromagnetic radiation. He conveys how little of it we actually see and how radio waves are present everywhere.

Benn Jordan explains how Flock Safety's license plate cameras log and share vehicle locations, and explores how adversarial AI can defeat them. It covers weak security and the surveillance risks of private police-camera networks.

Veritasium explains the effort to redefine the kilogram, which was still defined by a physical artifact, and how a near-perfect silicon sphere from the Avogadro project helps. It also covers the history of the unit's odd naming.

A clip from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman explains heat as the jiggling of atoms and how we perceive it as hot and cold.

Vox Earworm explains why John Coltrane's Giant Steps is so hard to improvise over: it is fast and moves through three keys. Musicians Braxton Cook and Adam Neely walk the host through the underlying music theory.

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.

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.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining how space and time swap roles inside a black hole's event horizon. It is part of the channel's black hole series.

Real Engineering's Brian McManus explains Helion's approach to nuclear fusion: colliding two plasma rings, compressing them magnetically, and capturing energy directly from the changing magnetic flux rather than boiling water. It covers why this pulsed design sidesteps problems of tokamaks and laser fusion.

Veritasium explains what a black hole should look like, using J.P. Luminet's 1979 work and a cardboard 3D model to show how light bends around it. It was made just as the first black hole image was released.

Veritasium explains why the kilogram is being redefined in terms of Planck's constant rather than a physical metal artifact. It visits NIST to show the Kibble balance and why measuring mass precisely is hard.

A PBS Space Time episode asking what matter, mass, and energy really are, starting with inertial versus gravitational mass and what mass-energy equivalence means.

A short Tracklib video visualizing the disco sample that Daft Punk's One More Time is built from. It shows how the track is composed from the original material.

PBS Space Time introduces Miguel Alcubierre's warp drive, explaining how spacetime itself could be warped rather than moving a ship through it, and whether it is physically possible.

3Blue1Brown explains how holograms record a 3D scene on 2D film, using wave diffraction and phase. The video includes demonstrations of several real holograms.

A PBS Space Time episode on how the Higgs mechanism gives particles mass, prompted by Fermilab's heavier-than-expected W boson measurement. It goes beyond the usual pop-science treatment without heavy math.

Vox breaks down how great rappers build rhymes, from Kurtis Blow's simple bars to Biggie's smooth flow and Kendrick Lamar's dense, fast delivery. It uses on-screen visualizations of rhyme structure.

A PBS Space Time episode hosted by Gabe Perez-Giz on the nature of spacetime and whether space and time are fundamental. It builds up reference frames and causality in a short, dense format.

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.

PBS Space Time explains what happens as you approach and cross a black hole's event horizon, using Penrose diagrams and light cones as the tool for understanding spacetime there.

Richard Feynman, in a clip from the BBC series Fun to Imagine, takes on the puzzle of why mirrors seem to swap left and right but not top and bottom.

Veritasium explores how electrical energy actually travels in a circuit, arguing that it flows through electromagnetic fields around the wires rather than through the electrons. It builds a long-cable experiment with Caltech to test when a distant bulb lights.

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.

Fermilab's Don Lincoln explains why light travels slower in water and glass. He knocks down common wrong explanations such as absorption and re-emission, then gives the wave-mechanics reason tied to refractive index.

Huygens Optics shows how DIY photon sieves shape a laser's wave front, explaining how they differ from zone plates and how aperture count affects the focal point, with time-resolved visualizations of the diffraction.

A Computerphile video in which Dr Mike Pound and PhD student Lewis Stuart explain 3D Gaussian splatting, a quick technique that turns photos of a scene into a 3D model without much compute. It includes a demo and compares the approach to NeRFs.

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.