Thursday already! Sorry, I forgot to put out the post yesterday -- the war in Ukraine has taken up a lot of my brainpower in the past days. I find the developments very disturbing on a number of levels.
In any case, maybe it will serve as a bit of escapism that on the weekend we will talk about cosmology again and look at the birth of our universe. In particular, we will talk about the ...
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This video is about Roger Penrose’s idea for the beginning of the universe and its end, conformal cyclic cosmology, CCC for short. It’s a topic that a lot of you have asked for ever since Roger Penrose won the Nobel Prize in 2020. The reason I’ve put off talking about it is that I don’t enjoy criticizing other people’s ideas, especia...
2022-02-26 13:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostAs you can tell I have some favorite topics that I keep coming back to. Quantum mechanics is without doubt one of them. Another one is astrophysics and cosmology. Up on the coming weekend is a topic that's been on the wish list for a long time, that is Roger Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. On Saturday we'll talk about how that works, what predictions it makes, and what its problems are. 2022-02-23 14:01:38 +0000 UTC View Post
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Physicists have shown that objective reality doesn’t exist. This is allegedly an insight derived from quantum mechanics. And not only this, 2022-02-19 13:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Some headlines raise more questions than they answer, and that's certain the case for quantum mechanics. In all honesty, I often don't understand popular science articles about quantum mechanics because of the many metaphors and analogies that they use. In the past year, we have in particular seen quite a few headlines claiming quantum mechanics implies that "reality doesn't exist". On Saturday...
2022-02-16 05:43:16 +0000 UTC View Post
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Scientists are rational by profession. They objectively evaluate the evidence and carefully separate fact from opinion. Except of course they don’t, really. In this episode, we will talk about some epic fights among scientists that show very much that scientists, after all, are only human. Who dissed whom and why and what can we learn from t...
2022-02-12 13:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostPeople often ask me where I find topics for my YouTube channel, how I come up with ideas. The truth is that I usually just talk about what is currently on my mind. This weekend we'll talk about a topic I have returned to many times: How scientists handle personal conflicts: Edison and Tesla, Dawkins and Wilson, Newton and Leibniz, Cope and Marsh, and Fred Hoyle against the entire world. I had a...
2022-02-09 06:01:07 +0000 UTC View Post
[This is a transcript of the video embedded above. Some of the explanations may not make sense without the animations in the video.]
According to the American Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2020 the COVID pandemic decreased life expectancy in the United States by about one year and a half. This finding was reported in countless media outlets, including the New York Times, B...
2022-02-05 13:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostWe have now spent 2 years living in a global pandemic. As everyone else I hope that omicron is the last big wave. On Saturday I will talk about what COVID did to life expectancy. Last year the CDC announced that COVID had decreased life expectancy in the US by about 2 years, and I noticed that many people misunderstood what this means, or rather, doesn't mean. So I hope my video will help to cl...
2022-02-02 06:50:43 +0000 UTC View Post
The James Webb Space Telescope has finally launched. And that’s exciting not just for astrophysicists, but for all space lovers. What makes the Webb telescope new and different? What is it looking for and what may it discover? That’s what we will talk about today.
The James Webb Space Telescope is a joint project between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency. I’ve heard astroph...
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Earthquakes are much more common than you might expect. An earthquake of magnitude 6 and up happens every couple of days somewhere on the planet. It’s just that most of them don’t affect densely populated areas, and, as the seismologist Nicholas Ambraseys put it “earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do”.
But earthquakes ...
As announced last week, this Saturday we'll talk about short-term predictions for Earthquakes, that are predictions which give people time to evacuate a city or at least seek shelter. The variety of earthquake precursors is remarkable and most of them are indeed not seismic in nature! We will talk for a bit about observed changes in the magnetic field and ionosphere but also about whether anima...
2022-01-27 06:34:57 +0000 UTC View Post
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Earthquakes are the most fatal natural disasters. According to a report from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, in the period from 1998-2017, Earthquakes accounted for 7.8% of natural disasters, but for 56% ...
2022-01-22 13:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostDid you see the satellite footage of the Tonga eruption? Here is an amazing clip of the shock wave traveling around the globe. Some weather stations measured it a second time, after it had gone around the entire globe!
While volcanoes are arguably scientifically interesting, they are als...
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Warp drives are not just science fiction. Einstein’s theory of general relativity says they should be possible. Yes, that guy again!
A year ago I told you about some recent developments, and since then warp drives have been in the news several times. In one case the headlines claimed that a physicist had found a warp drive that makes ...
I sometimes find it curious what research makes headlines. Eg there are a lot of breakthroughs in material science that concern battery technologies or photovoltaics that could have a huge impact on our future. But those news don't travel far. On the other hand multiverse and warp drive stories get picked up by daily newspapers. In the last year, warp drives in particular made headlines a few t...
2022-01-13 06:40:10 +0000 UTC View Post
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The politics of climate change receives a lot of coverage. The science, not so much. That’s unfortunate because it makes it very difficult to tell apart facts from opinions about what to do in light of those facts. But that’s what you have me for, to tell apart the facts from the opinions.
What we’ll look at in this video is a pec...
It's become difficult to talk about climate science because the topic is so politicized. That's really unfortunate, I think, because how can we sort out the politics without discussing the science? Today I want to pick up a topic that you have almost certain read about in the past years: extreme event attribution. That's the idea that you can attribute certain extreme weather events to climate ...
2022-01-05 13:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
[This video is about pronunciation. The transcript won’t make sense without the audio!]
It never occurred to me that one day people might want to hear me speak in a foreign language. That was not the plan when I studied physics. I’ve meanwhile subscribed to like a dozen English pronunciation channels and spend a lot of time with the online dictionary replaying words, so much ...
2022-01-01 13:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostI hope you are all having a little break in your life and find some time to relax. For me, this has been an adventurous year despite ongoing COVID interruptions. I found two people to help me with the YouTube channel, one to edit the videos and one for research and fact checking. We also regularly consult with other people, scientists and researchers, to make sure we don't misrepresent their re...
2021-12-30 06:56:14 +0000 UTC View Post
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Happy holidays everybody, today we’re celebrating Isaac Newton’s birthday with a hand selected collection of nerdy Christmas facts that you can put to good use in every appropriate and inappropriate occasion.
You have probably noticed that in recent years worshipping Newton on Christmas has become somewhat of a fad on social media...
It just so happens that this year both Christmas day and New Year's day are a Saturday. So we have been thinking about how to honor the occasion without being too cheesy about it, and decided to serve up a hand-selected collection of nerdy Christmas facts. Looking forward to seeing you on Saturday!
2021-12-22 11:39:25 +0000 UTC
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Superdeterminism is a way to make sense of quantum mechanics. But some physicists and philosophers have argued that if one were to allow it, it would destroy science. Seriously. How does superdeterminism work, what is it good for, and why does it allegedly destroy science? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
First things f...
2021-12-18 13:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostTwo years ago, I began doing videos about quantum mechanics and, among other things, the measurement problem. I promised you back then I would explain how superdeterminism solves the measurement problem. That video took a long time to come together, because I couldn't think of a good way to go about it without writing down equations. I think I've finally found a way to get the main idea across,...
2021-12-15 06:43:43 +0000 UTC View Post
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A few weeks ago I talked about hypersonic flight and why that doesn’t make sense to me. A lot of you asked what’s with Elon Musk’s hyperloop. Does it make any more sense to push high speed trains through vacuum tubes? Can we maybe replace flights with hyperloops? And what’s a hyperloop in the first place? That’s what we’ll talk abo...
2021-12-11 13:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostA few weeks ago we talked about hypersonic flight and whether that makes any sense. When I looked into the topic, I went away rather skeptical. Even leaving aside the sonic boom issue (on which improvements have been made but it's unclear whether those are sufficient), it's just extremely fuel expensive. Maybe one day we'll power airplanes with nuclear fusion, but until then I can't see h...
2021-12-08 15:05:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Is it ant-ee-matter or ant-ai-matter? What do ants think about it and why isn’t aunt pronounced aunt. These are all good questions that we’ll not talk about today. Instead I want to talk about why the universe contains so little antimatter, why that’s not a good question, and if there might be stars made antimatter in our galaxy. Welcome to another episode of science without th...
2021-12-04 13:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostLast week we talked about anti-gravity and why anti-matter doesn't fall up. This weekend we will talk about a related yet different question, namely, why is there so much more matter in the universe than anti-matter. Is this really a problem? Does it falsify Dirac's theory of anti-matter? And could there be stars in our galaxy made of anti-matter?
2021-12-01 17:58:17 +0000 UTC
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One of the lesser known facts about me is that I’m one of the few world experts on anti-gravity. That’s because 20 years ago I was convinced that repulsive gravity could explain some of the puzzling observations astrophysicists have made which they normally attribute to dark matter and dark energy. In today’s video I’ll tell you why that didn’t...
2021-11-27 13:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostI got into physics by reading science fiction and one of the technologies that has always fascinated me most was -- no, not the transporter -- but anti-gravitational devices. Imaging jumping off a rooftop and just flying away. Why do we have repulsive electric forces but not repulsive gravitational forces? On Saturday I tell you how much we know about anti-gravity, and also why it doesn't expla...
2021-11-24 15:27:48 +0000 UTC View Post