physics history

Physicist Carlo Rovelli gives a public lecture at the Royal Institution on how our understanding of time has changed, from Boltzmann and Einstein to quantum theory and loop quantum gravity. He blends physics, philosophy and art to argue that time is stranger than everyday intuition suggests.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

A Computer History Museum oral history with Avie Tevanian covering his math talent, work on the Mach microkernel at CMU, joining NeXT, leading NEXTSTEP development and the 1996 Apple acquisition.

A Computer History Museum oral history of Chuck Peddle, the engineer behind the 6502 and the Commodore PET, covering his career from GE through Motorola and MOS Technology. It runs nearly four hours.

A Computer History Museum oral history panel with four 3dfx founders on the company's rise with Voodoo Graphics and Glide, and its fall into bankruptcy. It runs about two and a half hours.

A Computer History Museum oral history interview with Dave Cutler, covering his youth, early work on operating systems at DuPont and Digital Equipment, and his path toward VMS and Windows NT. This is part one of a long-form interview.

Part two of a Computer History Museum oral history with Gary Davidian, covering his work on the 68000 emulator for PowerPC at Apple, Power Computing, clean-room contracting and later performance optimization work. It is nearly three hours long.

Grady Booch interviews John Backus, who led the IBM team that created FORTRAN in 1957, for the Computer History Museum in 2006. Backus describes the development of the first successful high-level language and its compiler. The interview runs 88 minutes.

A Computer History Museum oral history with Bill Mensch, designer of the 6502 and 65816, covering his path from a Pennsylvania farm through Motorola and later work.

A two-hour Computer History Museum oral history interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, conducted by Paul McJones in 2015. It covers his youth, education at Aarhus and Cambridge, his career at Bell Labs and elsewhere, and the design and evolution of C++.

Computer History Museum oral history of Steve Naroff, an engineer at Stepstone, NeXT and Apple who worked on Objective-C. This first session covers his childhood, music background and early career.

The first lecture of N J Wildberger's History of Mathematics course, starting with Pythagoras' theorem and following Stillwell's text. It emphasizes the flow of ideas over proofs.

The first episode of Crash Course World History, in which John Green covers the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and how it shaped civilization. It is delivered fast and with jokes.

A long documentary-style video arguing that slavery in the US effectively continued through convict leasing and the prison system until around 1942. It covers the constitutional carveout and the history of neoslavery.

First part of a four-part video history of Japan's electronics industry, covering the birth of the transistor and the rise of Japanese semiconductors. It appears to draw on NHK documentary material.

A roughly four-and-a-half-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Stephen Wolfram about his Wolfram Physics Project and a fundamental theory of physics, computation, life and the universe.

Dennis Gustafsson, creator of Teardown, presents how he parallelized the physics solver for an upcoming game, followed by a Q&A. The talk was given at the Better Software Conference 2025.

An ICFP 2015 keynote on the history of Standard ML, covering its ideas, principles and culture. It traces ML from Strachey, Landin and Milner through SML's development and its interplay with OCaml.

Kirk McKusick gives a narrative history of the Berkeley Software Distributions at MeetBSD California. He covers how BSD originated and evolved, including the origin of the networking releases.

Bill Wurtz's fast, comedic and musical run through the whole history of Japan in nine minutes.

Physicist Angela Collier critiques 'vibe physics', the idea that non-experts or billionaires can make scientific discoveries by chatting with AI chatbots, drawing a parallel with vibe coding.

Rob Pike gives an insider's account of the history of Unix and the development of key pieces of modern computing, including Bell Labs anecdotes.

A song by Pig With The Face Of A Boy that narrates the history of the Soviet Union from a worker's view, set to the Tetris melody.

Steve Blank tells how World War II, Stanford's Frederick Terman and military and intelligence agencies shaped the rise of Silicon Valley. The talk centers on the Cold War electronic warfare and signals intelligence work that seeded the region's tech industry.

Posy gives a short history of the computer mouse cursor, from early straight pointers to the tilted arrow, comparing Apple and Windows designs. He then explains why he designed his own cursor set and offers it as a free download.

Sean Carroll gives a Royal Institution talk tracing the history of quantum mechanics from Einstein and Bohr to today. He covers the Copenhagen interpretation and the many worlds interpretation.

Keith Packard traces the 35-year history of the X Window System at linux.conf.au 2020. He uses X to examine licensing, corporate interests and community dynamics in free software, including Unix workstation vendors and Stallman's influence.

Sandy Pentland of MIT presents his book on social physics, which uses big-data studies of how people interact to explain how ideas spread. He describes findings on collective intelligence and social influence.

Max Tegmark's MIT CBMM talk on why deep learning works so well. He argues that the laws of physics and the symmetries in physical data make it compressible into small neural networks, tying physics to network structure.

A fast, absurdist 19-minute animated run through the history of the whole world, narrated and scored by Bill Wurtz in his distinctive style. It compresses millennia of events into jokes, songs and quick visuals.

The Verge's documentary on Handspring and its Treo, a smartphone that came a decade before the iPhone. It tells how a small team tried to build the modern smartphone and was held back by carriers and timing.

A long-form video essay on the history of labor or 'left-wing' Zionism, drawing on historians of Palestine and Zionism to argue it played a role in dispossessing Palestinians.

The first part of Extra History's animated miniseries on the South Sea Bubble. It explains how England's government debt led Robert Harley to turn to financier John Blunt, whose schemes began inflating artificial demand for shares.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

A roughly three-hour Computer History Museum oral history interview of Donald Knuth by Edward Feigenbaum, recorded in 2007. Knuth covers his family, music, early programming, his thesis, The Art of Computer Programming, and the detour into TeX and METAFONT.

The first part of Extra History's series on the Bronze Age Collapse, introducing the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Mycenaeans and their interlinked system of trade, agriculture, and war before the Sea Peoples arrive.

A 1997 Computer History Museum lecture in which Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa recount how the Apple human interface was born, from the Lisa through the Macintosh. It covers design decisions such as discoverability and the standard editing keys.

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.

Physics Girl creator Dianna Cowern shares an update on her health, struggling with long COVID and ME/CFS. It includes documentary footage and links for supporting her recovery.

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.