In this, THE FIRST EPISODE of Crash Course Physics, your host Dr. Shini Somara introduces us to the ideas of motion in a straight line. She talks about displacement, acceleration, time, velocity, and the definition of acceleration. Also,...

Mr. Andersen introduces the concept of waves. Both transverse and logitudinal waves are described. The relationship between wave speed, wave frequency and wavelength is also included.

Some birds fly in V shapes because it has many benefits, but other birds fly in clumps instead. Why would they do that?

Hank explains absolute zero: -273.15 degrees Celsius - and the coldest place in the known universe may surprise you.

Our unit on the philosophy of religion and the existence of god continues with Thomas Aquinas. Today, we consider his first four arguments: the cosmological arguments.

In tropical seas, flying fish leap out of the water, gliding for up to 200 meters, before dipping back into the sea. In the Indo-Pacific, a hunting sailfish swims up to 110 kilometers per hour. These feats are made possible by a fish's...

You're on an airplane when you feel a sudden jolt. Outside your window nothing seems to be happening, yet the plane continues to rattle you and your fellow passengers as it passes through turbulent air in the atmosphere. What exactly is...

Bridges... bridges, bridges, bridges. We talk a lot about bridges in Physics. Why? Because there is A LOT of practical physics that can be learned from the planning and construction of them. In this episode of Crash Course Physics, Shini...

In the third act of "Swan Lake", the Black Swan pulls off a seemingly endless series of turns, bobbing up and down on one pointed foot and spinning around and around and around thirty-two times. How is this move - which is called a...

Physicist Werner Heisenberg said, "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." As difficult as turbulence is to understand...

Peering into the eyes of different animals, you'll see some extraordinarily shaped pupils. House cats, for one, are twilight hunters with vertically elongated pupils. Many grazing animals, like goats, have rectangular pupils. Other...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how forces on an object always require another object. An object cannot exert a force on itself. If net forces on an object are balanced the object will remain at rest or move with a constant...

Entropy is surely one of the most intriguing and misunderstood concepts in all of physics. The entropy of the universe must always increase - so says the second law of thermodynamics. It's a law that seems emergent from deeper laws -...

Thermometers might seem like a basic instrument, but science would not be the same without them, and they helped us understand one of the most important ideas in all of science: the conservation of energy.

The coldest materials in the world aren't in Antarctica or at the top of Mount Everest. They're in physics labs: clouds of gases held just fractions of a degree above absolute zero. Lina Marieth Hoyos explains how temperatures this low...

Expert timing and spacing is what separates a slide show from a truly amazing animation. TED-Ed demonstrates, by manipulating various bouncing balls, how the smallest adjustments from frame to frame can make all the difference.

Hank does his best to convince us that chemistry is not torture, but is instead the amazing and beautiful science of stuff. Chemistry can tell us how three tiny particles - the proton, neutron and electron - come together in trillions of...

What is torque? This is one of those things that you may have heard about in passing but never really understood. In this episode of Crash Course Physics, Shini sits down with us to discuss what torque is, how it works, why it works, and...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how Newton's Second Law applies when a net force acts on a body. The net force vector and the acceleration vector will act in the same direction. If an object acts on another object in a system the...

Quantum tunneling happens when a particle seemingly teleports across a barrier. But despite how instantaneous this event sounds, recent research suggests that it doesn’t happen nearly as fast as you might think.

We've learned a bit about how hummingbirds see motion in an unexpected way, and scientists are working on a potential new malaria vaccine by genetically manipulating the parasite that causes it!

Today Phil explains that YES, there are other planets out there and astonomers have a lot of methods for detecting them. Nearly 2000 have been found so far. The most successful method is using transits, where a planet physically passes...

In order to understand how we study the universe, we need to talk a little bit about light. Light is a form of energy. Its wavelength tells us its energy and color. Spectroscopy allows us to analyze those colors and determine an object’s...

We were recently visited by a traveler from outside our solar system. This is the first time we've ever seen an object that came to us from interstellar space. It's name is 'Oumuamua.