PickVidsBest Fundamental physics Videos
The 164 Fundamental physics videos here were recommended by different people across different months. Choose by who it is for: 12 introductory, 23 intermediate, 122 for a general viewer, and 7 for someone who wants the harder derivation. Most of them are an explainer. What they share is that one picture or analogy is used to supply a missing concept. Channels you will keep seeing include Veritasium, PBS Space Time, Christopher Sykes.
Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really)
Robert Bussard's 2006 Google Tech Talk on inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, a compact approach he argued could be cheap and clean, using boron-hydrogen fuel without neutron radiation.
Why is the Solar System Flat?
A minutephysics explainer on why the planets orbit in a flat plane.
Backspin Basketball Flies Off Dam
A short Veritasium video showing how far a backspinning basketball would travel dropped off a dam.
How does a whip break the sound barrier? (Slow Motion Shockwave formation) - Smarter Every Day 207
Smarter Every Day uses high-speed and Schlieren photography to show how a whip crack is a supersonic shockwave formed at the tip.
Why does light slow down in water?
Fermilab's Don Lincoln explains why light travels slower in water and glass.
The complete FUN TO IMAGINE with Richard Feynman
All six episodes of the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine, in which Richard Feynman muses on jiggling atoms, fire, rubber bands, magnets, electricity and more.
Light Waves Visualized using Photon Sieves.
Huygens Optics shows how DIY photon sieves shape a laser's wave front, explaining how they differ from zone plates and how aperture count affects the focal point, with time-resolved visualizations of the diffraction.
Risking My Life To Settle A Physics Debate
Veritasium investigates whether a wind-powered vehicle can travel directly downwind faster than the wind, driving the Blackbird craft himself.
Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe | Lex Fridman Podcast #85
Lex Fridman interviews physicist Roger Penrose on consciousness, the limits of computation, quantum mechanics and his cyclic cosmology.
Lecture 1 | Modern Physics: Classical Mechanics (Stanford)
The first lecture of Leonard Susskind's Stanford Continuing Studies course on modern physics, beginning with classical mechanics.
Turning Waves Into Particles
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.
Reynolds Number - Numberphile
Numberphile with Tom Crawford of Oxford explains the Reynolds number, the second of three videos on Navier-Stokes and fluid flow, with demonstrations of laminar versus turbulent behavior.
The Maths of General Relativity (1/8) - Spacetime and Worldlines
The first of an eight-part ScienceClic series building general relativity, covering worldlines, proper time and coordinate systems with animated visualizations.
A Physics Professor Bet Me $10,000 I'm Wrong
Veritasium recounts a $10,000 bet with a UCLA physics professor over whether a vehicle can travel downwind faster than the wind.
Magnetohydrodynamics - Propelling Liquid Metal with Magnets!
Tech Ingredients explains the principles of magnetohydrodynamics and builds several demonstrations, including propelling liquid metal and electrolytes with magnets and a railgun-style setup.
The Scientific Method-Richard Feynman
A one-minute clip of Richard Feynman describing the scientific method: guess a law, compute its consequences, and compare with experiment.
Feynman: Take the world from another point of view (1/4)
Part one of a four-part upload of a BBC Horizon documentary featuring Richard Feynman, in which he talks about physics and looking at the world from another point of view.
Episode 1: Introduction - The Mechanical Universe
The first episode of Caltech's The Mechanical Universe, a 52-part introductory university physics series.
Lecture by Douglas Hofstadter: Albert Einstein on Light; Light on Albert Einstein
Douglas Hofstadter lectures at Uppsala University on how analogy and daring thinking drove Einstein's discovery of light quanta.
The Absurdity of Detecting Gravitational Waves
Veritasium explains in detail how LIGO detects gravitational waves, with a laser interferometer measuring displacements smaller than a proton.
Why is Time a One-Way Street?
Leonard Susskind's Santa Fe Institute talk on the arrow of time: why the past differs from the future when physics equations are time-symmetric.
The Strangest Implication of Quantum Mechanics
A Veritasium video that follows the principle of least action from Bernoulli and Newton to quantum mechanics, asking whether light takes all possible paths at once.
Feynman: Magnets FUN TO IMAGINE 4 But see NEW UPDATED file at https://tinyurl.com/ycphc432
A clip from the BBC Fun to Imagine series in which Richard Feynman is asked how magnets work and explains why 'why' questions depend on a shared framework of understanding and cannot always be answered in layman's terms.
David Deutsch on Physics Without Probability
A 2015 talk by David Deutsch with slides and audio about constructor theory and how physics, in particular the many-worlds interpretation, can be framed without probability.