physics misconceptions

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

A Vsauce video exploring whether chairs exist, through metaphysics, mereology and the philosophy of categorizing objects. It runs about 38 minutes and cites academic work on ontology.

Sabine Hossenfelder asks whether complex numbers are just a convenient tool or necessary in physics. She discusses a recent paper arguing that quantum mechanics cannot be done with real numbers alone.

Veritasium visits the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory to see the world's strongest magnets and demonstrate effects like eddy currents. It covers what intense magnetic fields do to materials and objects.

A minutephysics explainer showing that the Moon's path around the Sun is not a spiral but closer to a 12-sided polygon with curved corners. It argues the Moon arguably orbits the Sun rather than the Earth.

Physics Girl compares hydrogen fuel cell cars and battery electric cars after driving 1800 miles in a Toyota Mirai. The video was part of a series sponsored by Toyota.

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.

PBS Space Time explains the proposal to use the Sun's gravity as a giant lens, sending a train of small light-sail spacecraft to the focal point roughly 550 AU out. It covers how such a telescope could image exoplanets in surprising detail and the engineering challenges involved.

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.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains how the greenhouse effect actually works, given that infrared is mostly absorbed low in the atmosphere already. She walks through why more CO2 still warms the surface.

CuriousMarc powers up a vintage HP 5061A cesium beam clock and explains both the quantum principle and the HP implementation in detail. It is part of a longer atomic clock series.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains the delayed choice quantum eraser and argues it does not rewrite the past, as popular accounts claim. She walks through what the experiment actually shows.

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.

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.

Huygens Optics explores the idea that space is a non-linear elastic medium, and uses simulations to show how wave energy might be confined locally into particle-like objects. It touches on inertia, the Schwinger limit and the vacuum as a medium.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains how her opinion on dark matter has shifted, weighing the evidence for and against it and the case for modified gravity. It runs through what dark matter is and why it has not been detected.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains why she thinks faster-than-light travel may not be ruled out. She argues that the standard objections from special relativity are inconclusive.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains that waste heat from ever-growing energy use could eventually boil the oceans in a few centuries, whatever the energy source. She discusses proposed ways to cool the planet.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explores molten glass and Prince Rupert's drops with a glass artist, including a process that freezes the moment glass shatters and an artisan who makes the drops.

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explains how 5G works and examines the health concerns around millimeter wave radiation. She reviews the scientific evidence and the open letters from scientists.

ScienceClic gives a 15-minute animated introduction to quantum field theory, covering fields, spin, conserved quantities, the standard model and interactions.

Technology Connections explains the difference between power (watts) and energy (watt-hours) and why confusing them leads to errors. It runs about 52 minutes and uses everyday examples.

PBS Space Time explains Roger Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology, in which the far future of our universe becomes the big bang of the next. It explores what could come after the universe ends.

Kurzgesagt explains black hole stars, a hypothesized kind of giant star with a black hole at its core that could be a route to early supermassive black holes.

PBS Space Time explores whether time causes gravity, explaining that gravity does not truly warp the flow of time but arises from time gradients. It revisits how gravitational time dilation works in general relativity.

Veritasium visits snowflake expert Dr Ken Libbrecht, who grows designer snowflakes in the lab. The video explains how snowflakes form and why they take so many shapes.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains how special relativity leads to the block universe, in which past, present and future all exist equally, and asks what that means for whether the past still exists.

Steve Mould shows Spintronics, a set of mechanical components such as resistors, capacitors and transistors linked by chains, that give an intuitive feel for how electrical circuits work.

Veritasium explores how synchronization arises spontaneously in nature, with metronomes, fireflies and bridges, drawing on Steven Strogatz's work on chaos and complexity.

Engineering Explained follows up on Tesla's claim that a Cybertruck towing a Porsche 911 could beat the 911 alone over a quarter mile. He walks through the MotorTrend drag race and explains why the claim did not hold up.

A short explainer from 2swap on the chaotic behavior of double pendulums. It examines how predictable the system is for some starting conditions and whether closed-form solutions exist.

A Kurzgesagt animation on supernovae, the most powerful explosions in the universe. It explains their role in creating elements and what would happen to Earth if one occurred nearby.