Leica Binoculars
At the Leica store in the Meatpacking District. Love me a good cutaway.…
seventeen things tagged “physics”
On What Matters
By Alan Lightman, from the very lovely documentary A Trip to Infinity. I fog up every time I see this. His smile towards the end is an emotional nuke and I’m a blubbery teary happy mess. I think of the Love I have in my life and am so very grateful. Here’s a transcript.…
The Center of Our Galaxy
Behold this stunning 3D model of some of the activity around the really massive Black Hole at the center of our lovely galaxy. It’s called Sagittarius A* and is some 4 million times more massive than our Sun. Humanity banded together to take a ‘photo’ of it in 2017. This video’s from that year. Th…
On Nothingness (Kinda)
An electron is a particular type of regularity that appears among measurements and observations that we make. It is more pattern than a substance. It is order… Thus we arrive at a strange place. We break things down into smaller and smaller pieces, but then the pieces, when examined, are not the…
This is a fantastic tour of a Hundred Concepts in Physics
No math/equations. Just clear and concise overviews of topics. Made as a video to fall asleep to!…
‘Seeing’ Radioactivity in a Cloud Chamber
This is super-cool. They place a piece of Uranium Oxide in a cloud chamber and you can actually see two kinds of radioactive ‘bullets’ just flying out of the sample: Alpha particles, which make shorter and chonkier streaks because they’re Helium nucleii which are much heavier than: Beta particle…
How Far Away is It
A cannot-believe-this-is-free collection of Physics videos on everything from Classical Mechanics to QM.
I was lucky. I went to good schools, I had excellent teachers. I was in the right place at the right time. Paul Dirac Opportunity and luck bestow their benisons upon a once-in-a-generation genius, mathematical mystic, and one of the greatest theoretical physicists to have walked the planet.…
On Consciousness
It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single a…
The Most Perfectly Timed Shot in the History of Television
Fat claim, but I cannot imagine anything more badass than this. Here’s the full video. The presenter’s James Burke. From the YouTube comments: I remember seeing an interview with him and the person asking him the question asked him “How was that shot perfectly timed?”…
The Cross-Section of a Black Hole
Here’s the full graphic. Watch anything by PBS SpaceTime on the subject 💯…
Developer site. A beautiful meditation that’s just the right length. Reminded me of “Osmos”, an all-time favorite. Won an Apple Design Award on 2018 (with “Florence”.)…
Concave Mirror, Ball, Black Hole
This video of a ball swinging in front of concave mirror (starts at 2:00, cannot embed for some reason) reminded me of simulations of what it would be like if one fell into a Black Hole. Here’s a Schwarzschild Black Hole, one “with mass, but with no electric charge, and no spin.” (Source) https:/…
Timelapse of the Future
Best thing I’ve seen this year. About as spiritual as it gets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA After an unimaginable length of time, even the black holes will have evaporated and the universe will be nothing but a sea of photons, gradually tending towards the same temperature, as the…
Muons
Minute Physics on how Muons reaching terrestrial detectors from the upper atmosphere are direct proof of time dilation/length contraction in Special Relativity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVzDP8SMhPo What a Boss 🙏 💯…
Freeman Dyson on Richard Feynman
When we arrived we were introduced to Henry Bethe, who is now five years old, but he was not at all impressed. The only thing he would say was “I want Dick. You told me Dick was coming,” and finally he had to be sent off to bed, since Dick (alias Feynman) did not materialise. About half an hour la…