MinutePhysics
What is Touch?
In this quantum world, what does it mean to touch something? Do we really hover above the chairs we're sitting in?
MinutePhysics
Open Letter to the President - Physics Education
Open Letter to the President - Physics Education
MinutePhysics
Magnets: How Do They Work?
How do magnets work? Why do they attract and repel at long distances? Is it magic? No... it's quantum mechanics, and a bit more, as we explain in this, the longest MinutePhysics video ever.
SciShow
We Don’t Know What the Sun Is Made Of
Unlike Earth, our Sun is a giant ball of mostly hydrogen and helium. Astronomers managed to figure that one out roughly 100 years ago. But after all this time, they still can't come to an agreement on what "mostly" means, precisely.
SciShow
How Much of the Periodic Table is in YOU?
About 99.9% of your typical human body is made of just 11 elements from the periodic table. But hiding in that remaining 0.1% are some elements that do some very important jobs to keep you alive and healthy. Including some elements you...
SciShow
Chernobyl's Radioactive Wild Boar Paradox
After the Chernobyl Disaster, researchers have been studying the movement of radioactive contamination all over central Europe. Fortunately, that radioactive contamination is decreasing in just about every living thing, except for one...
SciShow
Why the Hardest Rocks Can Be Easy to Break
So, rocks are hard. But the scale we use to rank them, the Mohs scale, is only really good at quantifying that for one kind of hardness, and topaz is a perfect stone to talk about to explain that. And you can check it out in our SciShow...
SciShow
Plasma, The Most Common Phase of Matter in the Universe
Get to know plasma, the most common, but probably least understood, phase of matter in the universe!
SciShow
The World’s Strongest Acid Might be Gentle Enough to Eat
Hearing the word "superacid" may evoke memories of that scene from Breaking Bad, but perhaps counterintuitively, the strongest acid on Earth wouldn't be able to destroy your bathroom.
SciShow
Mercury Shouldn't Be Liquid. But It Is.
Mercury, a.k.a. quicksilver, is famous for being a liquid at room temperature...and also below room temperature. But you can't use a high school chem class to explain why. Instead, we need a little help from Einstein.
SciShow
Fighting Carbon With Carbon
To reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, some researchers are taking carbon capture technology to the source(s) — for example, slurping up CO2 before it ever leaves the power plant that made it. But that's not all! Some...
PBS
Cosmic Microwave Background Challenge | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
If a photon leaves the train station shortly after the Big Bang ...
PBS
Can Free Will be Saved in a Deterministic Universe?
Physicists have a long history of sticking our noses where they don’t belong - and one of our favorite places to step beyond our expertise is the question of consciousness and free will. Sometimes our musings are insightful, sometimes...
PBS
Electrons DO NOT Spin
Quantum mechanics has a lot of weird stuff - but there’s thing that everyone agrees that no one understands. I’m talking about quantum spin. Let’s find out how chasing this elusive little behavior of the electron led us to some of the...
PBS
Does Antimatter Explain Why There's Something Rather Than Nothing?
The most precious substance in our universe is not gold, nor oil. It’s not even printer ink. It’s antimatter. But it’s worth every penny of it’s very high cost, because it may hold the answer to the question of why anything exists in our...
PBS
Zeno's Paradox & The Quantum Zeno Effect
“A moving arrow is at rest.” This is obviously a nonsensical contradiction. But Zeno, a Greek philosopher famous for his metaphysical trolling, devised a paradox whose conclusion is just this. Here’s how it goes: if you look at an arrow...
PBS
How Do We Know What Stars Are Made Of?
Pin-pricks in the celestial sphere, through which shines the light of heaven? Or gods and heroes looking down from their constellations? Or lights kindled above middle earth by Varda Elbereth and brightened with the dew of the trees of...
PBS
Why Is 1/137 One of the Greatest Unsolved Problems In Physics?
The Fine Structure Constant is one the strangest numbers in all of physics. It’s the job of physicists to worry about numbers, but there’s one number that physicists have stressed about more than any other. That number is 0.00729735256 -...
SciShow
The Nuclear-Powered Clocks of the Future
Atomic clocks are the best timekeepers humanity's got these days, but scientists are working toward something even better: a SUB-atomic (aka nuclear) clock.
SciShow
How to See Inside Anything
You might think of x-rays as the go-to particle to see through solid objects. But there's a subatomic particle out there that can see through everything from volcanos to lead shielding in nuclear reactors. It's called a muon, and...
SciShow
The Sun Is Green
The Sun is green, actually. We'll go into why the blackbody effect means the Sun emits more green visible light than any other color, and why evolution and color perception mean it's ok to see it as yellow, anyway.